Washington : Pakistan’s intelligence had knowledge about the death of reclusive Taliban chief Mullah Omar and its move to hide the news is “failure” of not only the US-Pak intelligence co-operation, but also the American intelligence as well, a former top Pentagon official has said. Mullah Omar is reported to have died in a hospital in Karachi in, 2013. But the information about his mysterious death, most probably due to tuberculosis, was leaked only this month and then subsequently confirmed by the Taliban, the White House and the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan, which has considerable influence over the Taliban leadership and was instrumental in bringing them to the peace talks table with the democratically elected government of Afghanistan last month, has as usual strongly denied that it had any information about the death of Omar.
Lalit K Jha