Pakistan Army, Afghan Taliban reject report about Mullah Omar’s surgery in Karachi
By ANIThursday, January 20, 2011
ISLAMABAD - The Pakistan Army has dismissed the report about Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s surgery in Karachi with the help of Pakistan’s spy agency as “unfounded and concocted”.
“An ISPR spokesman strongly contradicted the news item that appeared in the local and international media about the medical treatment of Afghan Taliban Mullah Mohammad Omar at Karachi,” Pakistan’s Inter Services Public Relations said in a “clarification” released on Thursday.
“He [ISPR spokesman] said that news is unfounded and concocted to serve vested interests,” it added.
Meanwhile, the Afghan Taliban have also dismissed the report as the “enemy’s baseless claims” that Mullah Omar was treated in Karachi.
“The Afghanistan Islamic Emirate categorically rejects the unfounded and groundless claims by the enemy and describes such rumours as part of propaganda war launched by the enemy,” Xinhua quoted a Taliban statement, as saying.
Released by Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, the Pashto-language statement said that Mullah Omar was not suffering from any such disease that would require hospitalisation.
“The enemy is spreading all these rumours to hide their military defeat (in Afghanistan) and to divert attention of the people,” the statement said.
The Washington Post had reported on Wednesday that an intelligence network, operating under the auspices of a private company- “The Eclipse Group”- said 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.
Its source was a physician in the Karachi hospital, who was not identified in the report.
“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 physician was quoted, as saying.
The Taliban statement said the “enemy has neither any document nor any proof to prove their claims.”
“The source of unnamed doctor as weak as he himself admits that he had not seen Mullah Omar but had heard from other doctors,” it added. (ANI)
