US drone strike kills leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-ul-Ahrar militants

Jamaat-ul-Ahrar is a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban.

The leader of Pakistani militant group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, who planned some of the deadliest suicide bombings in Pakistan over the last year, died on Thursday of wounds sustained in a US drone strike in Afghanistan, a spokesman said.

US Air Force MQ-1B Predator remotely piloted aircraft as it flies overhead during a training mission in Nevada. (AFP File Photo)

“Our leader, Omar Khalid Khorasani, was wounded in one of the recent drone strikes in Afghanistan. He was wounded badly, and today he was martyred,” Asad Mansoor, a Jamaat-ul-Ahrar spokesman, said by telephone.

The killing comes ahead of American Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit next week and is likely to further ease tensions between the often-wary allies, as Islamabad has been asking Washington for years to target militants who attack inside Pakistan and then hide over the border in Afghanistan.

A splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar has in the past also backed Middle East-based Islamic State and has increasingly targeted religious minorities in Pakistan.

The group claimed responsibility for last year’s Easter Sunday bombing in a public park that killed 70 people, many of them Christians, in the eastern city of Lahore.