Pakistan's interior minister said on Sunday that he was "98 percent
sure" senior al Qaeda operative Ilyas Kashmiri was killed in a U.S.
drone strike near the Afghan border.
U.S. officials in Washington
were skeptical over reports that Kashmiri, seen as one of the world's
most dangerous militants, was dead.
A U.S. National Security
official said he could not confirm that he had been killed and another
U.S. official said it was doubtful.
"All ground intelligence shows
that he is dead. What I can say is there is a 98 percent chance he is
dead," Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Reuters.
"Since we do not have the body. We do not have DNA we need to confirm. This is the substantive evidence we are looking for."
That may not be possible since
it is very difficult for Pakistani security forces to get to areas like
South Waziristan where intelligence officials said Kashmiri was killed
in a drone strike on Friday night.
After missile strikes by remotely-operated drone aircraft, militants often seal off the area then bury their comrades.
The elimination of Kashmiri
would be another coup for the United States after American special
forces killed Osama bin Laden in a garrison town close to Islamabad on
May 2.
The killing of bin Laden
aroused international suspicions that Pakistani authorities had been
complicit in hiding him, and led to domestic criticism of them for
failing to detect or stop the U.S. team that killed him.
A senior Pakistani security
official said: "It's almost confirmed that he is dead. Different
sources confirmed it but we can't say it is 100 percent confirmed
because we don't have the body."
He went on to say that Kashmiri was holding a meeting with other militants when the drone missile struck.
U.S. doubts over claims of
Kashmiri's demise may be further evidence of deep distrust between
Pakistani and U.S. intelligence services public pledges by Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton and other American officials that relations had
improved.
One intelligence official said
that Pakistan had tipped off the Americans about the whereabouts of
Kashmiri, whom the U.S. Department of State has labeled a "specially
designated global terrorist."
Kashmiri, said to be a former
Pakistani military officer, has been linked to attacks including the
2008 rampage through the Indian city of Mumbai which killed 166 people.
A Pakistani television station
quoted the group Kashmiri headed, Harkat-ul Jihad Islami (HUJI) which
is allied to al Qaeda, as saying he had been killed and that it will
avenge his death.
The SITE online monitoring
service said the HUJI statement was posted on a jihadist forum it
tracks. The U.S. National Security official expressed doubts about the
statement. Its authenticity could not be independently verified.
Kashmiri was reported to have
been killed in a September 2009 strike by a U.S. drone. He resurfaced
and gave an interview to Asia Times online correspondent Saleem Shahzad.
Shahzad disappeared from
Islamabad a week ago. His body was found in a canal two days later with
what police said were torture marks. The media and human rights groups
have speculated that Pakistan's military intelligence agency may have
had hand in the killing, an allegation it strongly denied.
Human Rights Watch said Shahzad
had voiced concern about his safety after getting threatening telephone
calls from Pakistani intelligence agents and was under surveillance
since 2010.
Before his death, Shahzad wrote
an article stating that Kashmiri's followers carried out a militant
siege of the PNS Mehran naval base in Karachi last month which drew
sharp public criticism of the Pakistani military. Reuters
