KANDAHAR, Nov 29: Taliban leader Mullah Omar should confirm if the group was behind the murder of an Indian worker last week so Afghanistan can know its ‘enemy’, President Hamid Karzai said on Tuesday.
A purported Taliban spokesman has already said the hardline movement had kidnapped and killed the man because his company, an Indian government road construction firm, did not heed a demand to leave the country.
But Mr Karzai, who is pushing reconciliation with loyalists of the Taliban, said the group’s leader Mullah Omar should confirm the claim.
“If Mullah Omar is behind the attack, no doubt he’s the enemy of Afghanistan,” Mr Karzai said during a visit to the southern province of Kandahar, from where the Taliban rose up to control most of Afghanistan by 1996.
“If he’s not behind the attack, I call on him to come up and say that he was not... so we can know our enemy,” Mr Karzai said.
“Whoever they are, they don’t want the reconstruction of Afghanistan,” he said.
The US government has offered a 10-million-dollar bounty for the capture of Mullah Omar.
President Karzai, who shares the same Pakhtun ethnicity as most Taliban, has been accused of being too accommodating of the group, with some of its former members appointed to government positions.
A US-led force of about 20,000 troops is also helping Afghan forces hunt down the militants.
India’s National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan was quoted as saying last week that the death of Maniyappan Raman Kutty, whose body was dumped on a roadside, was the result of a ‘conspiracy’ between Pakistan and the Taliban.—AFP
