Pakistani and US officials are increasingly convinced that the leader of the Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, who was behind the suicide attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan in December, had died from wounds sustained in a drone strike, The New York Times reported late Sunday.
The newspaper said the military, which mounted a major offensive against Mehsud and his loyalists in South Waziristan last year, said it could not confirm the report. But government officials in the capital, Islamabad, and Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, said they believed that there was a good chance Mehsud was dead, though they could not offer proof, the report said.
A official from the Barack Obama administration in Washington said intelligence reports over the weekend came close to a definitive conclusion - about 90 percent certainty - that Mehsud had died from wounds suffered in a drone strike on January 14 and that he was believed to have been buried in a tribal plot in Pakistan's tribal areas, the paper noted.