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1st LD Writethru: U.S. drone strike in Pakistan kills driver, passenger, not Mullah Mansoor -- Pakistani media

Xinhua, May 22, 2016 Adjust font size:

The U.S. drone strike launched in Pakistan on Saturday (Pakistan time) killed a taxi driver and a passenger, but not Afghan Taliban top leader Mullah Mansoor, reported local Urdu TV channel Samaa on Sunday.

The report said that the bodies of the two killed have been brought to a hospital in Nushki, a district close to Ahmad Wal, a small town in Pakistan's southwest province of Balochistan along the Pak-Afghan border, where the U.S. drones launched a strike on Saturday afternoon, which reportedly killed the Taliban leader Mullah Mansoor.

According to the identity cards collected from the two bodies, the driver's name is Muhammad Azam and the passenger's name is Wali Muhammad, a resident from Chaman, a town sitting on the Pak-Afghan border, said the report, adding that the plate number of the taxi which got hit by the U.S. drone strike is ALL-570.

So far there is no official response from the Pakistani side about the death of Mullah Mansoor.

An official from ISPR, a mouthpiece of the Pakistani Army, refused to make any comments on the news about the death of Mullah Mansoor when approached by Xinhua reporter on the telephone.

Local Urdu TV Channel 92 News quoted an unidentified Taliban commander close to Mullah Mansoor as saying the report about the death of Mullah Mansoor was not true.

Al Jazeera, a TV channel based in the Gulf region, also reported that Taliban had denied the death of Mullah Mansoor.

Earlier some of the western and Pakistani media reported that Mullah Mansoor and one of his colleague was likely killed on Saturday when the U.S. drones fired two missiles at their vehicle moving in the town of Ahmad Wal.

The U.S. Pentagon, while confirming the drone strike in a remote area of the Pak-Afghan border region at about 3 pm (Pakistan time) on Saturday, said that the U.S. military was still assessing the results of the strike.

Born in 1960s, Mullah Mansoor was officially announced as the new top leader of Afghan Taliban on July 30, 2015, a day after the news about the death of former Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar was disclosed.

The news about the death of Mullah Mansoor came at a time when Afghan Taliban had refused to come back to the negotiation table despite the repeated efforts made by the Pakistani side along with other countries for the peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan. Endit