WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama said on Thursday ‘we took out’ Baitullah Mehsud, the Pakistani Taliban chief believed to have been killed this month in a missile strike by a US drone.

Obama's comments seemed to go further than other US officials who had said there was a ‘90 per cent certainty’ that Mehsud had been killed on Aug. 5, although there was no confirmation.

‘You've got the Pakistan army for the first time fighting in a very aggressive way and that's how we took out Mehsud, the top Taliban leader in Pakistan who was also one of Osama bin Laden's key allies,’ Obama told a radio talk show host in a live broadcast from the White House.

Mehsud was blamed for a wave of bombings across Pakistan, including the 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.—Reuters