Mullah Omar treated for heart attack in Karachi hospital with Pak spy agency ISI’s help

WASHINGTON - Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar was treated for several days in a Karachi hospital with the assistance of Pakistan’s spy agency after he suffered a heart attack on January 7, according to a private intelligence network run by former CIA, State Department and military officers.

Operating under the auspices of a private company- “The Eclipse Group”- the intelligence network said its source was a physician in the Karachi hospital, who was not identified in the report.

According to the report, the elusive, one-eyed leader of the Afghan Taliban was “rushed” to the hospital on January 7 by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

“The ISI rushed him [Omar] to a hospital in Karachi, where he was given heparin [an anticoagulant] and operated on,” the Washington Post quoted the Eclipse report, as saying.

“After 3-4 days of post-operative care in the hospital, he was released to the ISI and ordered to take absolute bed rest when at home for at least several days,” the report added.

The physician, who was the source for the report, said: “While I was not personally in the operating theatre, my evaluation based on what I have heard and seeing the patient in the hospital is that Mullah Omar had a cardiac catheter complication resulting in either bleeding or a small cerebral vascular incident, or both.”

The doctor said he saw Omar struggling to recover from an operation to put a stent in his heart. “After the operation, there seemed to be some brain damage with Mullah Omar having slurred speech.”

“His post hospital course is consistent with this type of outcome,” informed the physician, adding, “Three-four days in hospital is consistent with cardiac catheterization and or cardiac stent placement.

Bed rest and aphasia [difficulty speaking] post-catheterization could be from a bleeding complication.”

Citing a separate source in the Quetta Shura- the Taliban’s governing council on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan- the Eclipse report said: “Mullah Omar is continuing to improve and his speech is clearing.”

It also said the ISI was keeping the Quetta Shura “informed” about Omar’s recovery at “an ISI ‘guest house’ in Karachi under ISI guard.”

Meanwhile, US officials said they could not immediately verify the report.

“No one on this end has heard this,” said a US official from Kabul. “It doesn’t mean it’s not true- we just have no information to confirm or dispute these facts.”

While a spokesman at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment, Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said on Tuesday that the report “had no basis whatsoever.”

“Sometimes intelligence tips received by professionals turn out to be wrong. The story about Mullah Omar falls under that category. You might recall a similar story from 2001 about Osama bin Laden receiving dialysis treatment that turned out to be incorrect, and the fabrication of those who wanted to give Pakistan a bad name,” the paper quoted Haqqani, as saying.

“Pakistani intelligence, military and law enforcement personnel continue to hunt down wanted Al-Qaeda and Taliban figures and will apprehend anyone if and when we have hard intelligence, which is very different from speculation circulated by contractors,” he added. (ANI)