Peshawar, Jan 23 (DPA) A Pakistani insurgent group has executed a former senior officer of the country’s top intelligence organisation who once trained Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar, intelligence and rebel sources said Sunday.
Amir Sultan, a retired officer of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), also known by the code name Colonel Imam, was kidnapped with another intelligence officer and a British-Pakistani journalist in April last year.
An intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity said Sultan was assassinated near Mir Ali city in the restive North Waziristan tribal district Saturday.
His family had failed to meet deadline for paying a ransom of Rs.50 million ($590,000), the source said.
A local Taliban commander in Mir Ali confirmed the execution, calling it ‘a sorrowful incident’.
Neither the government nor Sultan’s family have confirmed the death.
Various groups of militants in North Waziristan were divided on the capture of Sultan, who gave guerrilla training to Afghan mujahideen during the resistance against Soviet occupation and supported the rise of Taliban in mid-1990s.
Senior Afghan Taliban commander Sirajuddin Haqqani, who has bases in North Waziristan, is believed to have made several attempts to convince a militant group from Pakistan’s central province of Punjab to release Sultan.
Sultan had travelled to North Waziristan with ISI officer Khalid Khwaja to help journalist Saeed Qureshi in making a documentary. Khwaja was reportedly executed by the Punjabi Taliban, a group of militants from Pakistan’s largest province.
