Tahir Yuldashev, an al Qaeda-linked Uzbek militant and Central Asia's most wanted Islamist fighter, has been killed, a US monitoring group quoted his fighters as saying on Monday. The SITE Intelligence Group said the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) had posted a series of photographs showing the dead body of a bearded man whom it described as Yuldashev.
SITE said the IMU also posted Uzbek-language messages from IMU officials, and described Yuldashev as "slain", without giving further details. Reuters could not independently verify the IMU statement. Yuldashev has been declared dead several times before, including once in 2009 when Pakistani intelligence officials said he was killed in a US drone attack in the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border. Militants, on that occasion, posted videos on the Internet saying that their leader was alive. He was accused of a series of bomb attacks in the Uzbek capital Tashkent in 1999 and was sentenced to death in absentia.