Pakistani security officials expressed doubts on Sunday over reports from the United States that it had killed the al Qaeda second-in-command near the Afghan border. A senior US official said on Saturday that Atiyah abd al-Rahman had been killed in the northwest tribal area of Waziristan on August 22, without divulging the circumstances of his death. However, local officials in the region said last week that a US drone strike in North Waziristan on that date had killed at least four militants but it was not clear if the two incidents were connected. A senior Pakistani security official in Peshawar said, “We have checked this news report with informers and have worked on it. I doubt the authenticity of this news.”
Another security official in Miramshah, the main town in North Waziristan, said he had received no information on the killing. “For me it is just a rumour. Frankly speaking, we are even not aware that a man with this name is working as deputy chief of al Qaeda,” he added. The officials said the remote, mountainous area, just four kilometres from the Afghan border, is inaccessible. “In such cases we rely on information sent from informers. We have not received any type of such a report,” the security official in Mir Ali town, North Waziristan, told AFP.
