PESHAWAR: Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Mullah Fazlullah was killed in a US drone strike on June 13, a senior intelligence official confirmed.

Fazlullah was reportedly travelling in a vehicle along with four other commanders when they were targeted by a drone strike at 11pm on June 13 in Afghanistan’s Kunar province.

The drone strike was also confirmed by Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defence spokesperson Mohammad Radmanish. “A US drone strike in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar province has killed the leader of the TTP,” he told CNN.

“US forces conducted a counterterrorism strike, June 13,
in Kunar province, close to the border between Afghanistan and
Pakistan, which targeted a senior leader of a designated
terrorist organization,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Martin O’Donnell, a
spokesman for US forces in Afghanistan.

On Thursday, sources in the security and intelligence agencies had said the elusive chief of the outlawed outfit was killed in the US drone strike in the northeastern province of Kunar.

Fazlullah was named TTP chief after the death of Hakimullah Mehsud in a drone strike in November 2013. The TTP leader had a reputation as a ruthless commander prepared to do anything to enforce his uncompromising interpretation of Islamic law.

In 2006 he began delivering fiery sermons on his own FM station, earning the nickname “Mullah Radio”, railing against polio vaccination programmes and girls’ education. Three years later, the TTP under his command made an unsuccessful attempt to kill 11-year-old Malala Yousufzai. Malala had been writing a blog chronicling the horrors of life under the Taliban. She survived being shot in the head and has gone on to become a global icon of the struggle against extremism.

Mullah Radio was designated a global terrorist by the United States and carried a bounty of $5 million. He had been on the run since his loyalists were routed in a major military operation in Swat district of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in 2009.