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Taliban reject Mullah Omar’s arrest

08 July 2010 00:40 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Taliban militants in Afghanistan have rejected reports that their reclusive leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has been arrested in neighboring Pakistan, APA reports quoting â€œPress TVâ€.

Speaking on Tuesday, Taliban spokesperson Zabeeh Ullah dismissed the report as part of the Western media propaganda efforts.

Ullah said that Mullah Omar was still in Afghanistan and called on the US to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.

The remarks came in reaction to an earlier report by a US blogger, claiming that the Taliban leader had been detained in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi.

Despite having confirmed the arrest of a large number of Taliban militants in 2009 and 2010, Pakistani intelligence and police officials have neither confirmed nor denied the report.

Meanwhile, a former senior member of the militant group said Pakistani security forces were harboring Mullah Omar in Karachi.

Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi, who was the governor of central Uruzgan Province under the Taliban regime, told an Afghan news website that the Taliban chief was currently in the Pakistani city of Karachi.

Hanafi also claimed that foreign troops and the Taliban were engaged in a complicated game in Afghanistan. He said that British troops were providing training for the Taliban and paid each militant three-hundred dollars per month.

The former Taliban official went on to claim that Taliban militants supported by the UK were living freely in Helmand Province, adding that they had never been the target of any attacks.

He also claimed that British forces had told him about their plans for staying in Afghanistan for the next 40 years.

The report comes as the US and its allies have put forward a proposal to remove Omar’s name from the UN Security Council’s terror blacklist.

Meanwhile, senior officials in the UK have floated the idea of making peace with the Taliban -- the militant group whose uprooting was ostensibly one of the main objectives of the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Omar, the founder of the Taliban, was Afghanistan’s de facto head of state from 1996 to 2001.

He was unseated in the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan. However, US forces have not managed to apprehend Omar, or al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden nine years after the war.