Quetta, PAKISTAN (AFP)
Pakistani security forces wounded and captured a top Taliban commander in a shootout on Monday, police said, days after Islamabad denied the presence of senior militants on its soil.
Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, the brother of the Islamist movement's slain military commander in Afghanistan, and seven other rebels were seized in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province, they said.
Dadullah had been in charge of operations against Western troops in the southern Afghan province of Helmand, but there were recent reports that he had been sacked by Taliban supremo Mullah Mohammed Omar.
One of Dadullah's guards died of his wounds after a shootout with security forces but the injured commander himself was "out of danger", offcialas said, dismissing local media reports that Dadullah had died.
Dadullah had succeeded his elder brother -- the Taliban's most top military commander Mullah Dadullah -- who was killed in a joint Afghan-NATO operation in southern Afghanistan in May 2007.
The Taliban said in a statement late December that they had sacked Mansoor Dadullah "because he disobeyed orders of the Islamic Emirate" of the Taliban.
But a spokesman for the commander denied that he was fired, leading to speculation about infighting among the rebels.
There was no immediate confirmation of the arrest from the Taliban. Zabihullah Mujahed, a Taliban spokesman, said Mansoor Dadullah was one of five Taliban who were freed in May last year in exchange for a kidnapped Italian journalist, Daniele Mastrogiacomo.
The Afghan government has never said which prisoners were released in the controversial deal.
News of Dadullah's capture comes a day after U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned that Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in the country's border regions posed a direct threat to the Islamabad government.
A top al-Qaeda operative, Abu Laith al-Libbi, was killed in a suspected U.S. missile strike in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area bordering Afghanistan last month.
The Islamic extremist Taliban militia ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 and gave sanctuary to bin Laden, who masterminded the September 11 attacks in the United States.
A U.S.-led invasion in October 2001 ousted the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, but they have regrouped and are putting up increasingly stiff resistance to NATO-led international forces.
Allied Pakistani Taliban militants have meanwhile stepped up an insurgency on their side of the border and have been linked by Islamabad to the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto in December. |
