Maulana Fazlullah, Pakistan Taliban commander, was “seriously” injured in military operations in the country’s northwest, which also witnessed fresh sectarian violence that killed 27 people on Wednesday.

“It has been confirmed that he (Fazlullah) has been hit and seriously injured,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik said.

Most Taliban leaders were hiding because of military action, but the authorities would “bring them out of their hideouts”, he told the BBC. “These militants who are sitting in South Waziristan and planning terrorist activities from there, I won’t call them Taliban, I would call them ‘zaliman’ (wrongdoers),” Malik said.

He said the “unity” among militant factions in the wake of the decision by authorities to target Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan chief Baitullah Mehsud was something the Government anticipated.

Taliban commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, leader of a militant faction considered to be pro-Government, scrapped a peace deal in North Waziristan and decided to resume operations in retaliation for military operations in the tribal belt.

“Be it Gul Bahadur or Commander Nazeer, be it Qari Hussain or Baitullah or Hakimullah (Mehsud), they are all branches of the same tree. They all are hardcore terrorists who should be called ‘zaliman’ and not Taliban.”

The militant commanders had formed small groups, which were later united into a larger group called the Tehrik-e-Taliban, he said.

“When these terrorists saw that Pakistan’s enemies were giving them a lot of cash and cars and that there is good money in this, then they also involved the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammad in their work. Therefore, what happened as a result was that al-Qaeda transferred all its terrorist activities to the Tehrik-e-Taliban,” Malik said.

... contd.