Taliban spokesman on Monday vehemently denied a swirl of rumors that the movement's spiritual leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, had died or been killed, even as Afghanistan's main intelligence service asserted that the reclusive cleric had disappeared from his alleged Pakistan hideout.
The Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said by telephone that Omar — the one-eyed, self-declared "leader of the faithful" who has long been thought to be hiding in Pakistan — was alive and well, directing the group's military campaign in Afghanistan.
Western diplomats in Kabul, together with tribal and intelligence sources in Pakistan, expressed skepticism over Omar's reported demise — which was far from the first time that claims of his death had surfaced.
Nonetheless, the reports spread like wildfire — aided by social media such as Twitter — reflecting the intense degree of speculation surrounding Omar's fate, dramatically heightened in the three weeks since Navy SEALs killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in a raid in Pakistan.
Amid the flurry of claims, Afghanistan was shaken as usual by violence. Western military officials reported the deaths of four service members in a roadside bombing in the country's east, and Afghan officials said four tribal elders were killed in a suicide bombing in Laghman province, also in the east.
A spokesman for Afghanistan's main intelligence service, Lutfullah Mashal, told reporters in Kabul that Omar had disappeared several days ago from Pakistan's Baluchistan province — the seat of the Taliban leadership council known as the Quetta Shura — and had not been heard from since.
"Our sources and senior Taliban commanders have confirmed that they have not been able to contact Mullah Omar," Mashal said at a news conference. "So far, we cannot confirm the death or killing of Mullah Omar."
Earlier, Mashal told the Associated Press that Omar was thought to have been transported from his base in Quetta to the tribal agency of North Waziristan with the knowledge of Hamid Gul, a former Pakistani intelligence chief known to be sympathetic to the insurgents. Gul went on Pakistani television to deny the report, saying that he does not even know Omar.
Afghanistan's Tolo television took it a step further, citing unidentified sources in the country's National Directorate of Security, or NDS, as saying Omar had been killed while in the process of being moved to North Waziristan. But sources in the close-knit tribal area said there was no sign the report was true.
Nearly a decade ago, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Omar defied Western demands to hand over Bin Laden, instead providing him shelter. Both men then became the subject of international manhunts, with multimillion-dollar bounties on their heads.
Omar fled on the back of a motorbike into the mountains outside Kandahar, at the time the Taliban's base of operations, and was thought to have made his way across the border to Pakistan. Bin Laden was tracked to the mountains of Tora Bora, in eastern Afghanistan, but he too slipped away.
A Pakistani intelligence official who asked not to be named said Monday that the country's intelligence community had no information to suggest that Omar was dead. Pakistan has always denied knowledge of Omar's whereabouts, as it did those of Bin Laden.
Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, called reports of Omar's death propaganda meant to shake the confidence of the group's fighters in the field. Since Bin Laden's death, the movement also has dismissed reports that its leadership entered into talks aimed at beginning peace negotiations with the West or the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Officials with NATO's International Security Assistance Force said they were aware of reports of Omar's death, which surfaced Monday morning on Afghan and Pakistani television and were swiftly picked up by several other news outlets.
"There is certainly a great temptation to start giving comments on this, or getting into speculation, but this is not what I am going to do here now, because what we really need, of course, is a confirmation on what has really happened," ISAF spokesman Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz told reporters in Kabul.
"We need to wait," he said.
The revelation that, at the time of the SEALs' raid, Bin Laden had been living for about five years in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad revived longstanding anger in Afghanistan over Pakistan's presumed sheltering of other militant figures.
Despite Pakistan's furious public protests that the U.S. raid violated its sovereignty, President Obama told the BBC this week that the United States would act again if it had reason to think another senior terrorist leader was hiding on Pakistani soil.
