TALOQAN (Afghanistan) Nov 25: An Islamic militant leader from Uzbekistan who was a longtime ally of Osama bin Laden was killed in northern Afghanistan, an anti-Taliban commander said on Sunday.

The most wanted man in Uzbekistan, Juma Namangani was wounded while fighting the Northern Alliance in the Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif near the Uzbek border, Alliance commander Mohammad Daoud told a news conference.

“Juma Namangani was wounded in Mazar-i-Sharif and was treated in Kabul. He died in Kabul during the treatment,” Daoud said in the northern city of Taloqan.

He said Namangani, 32 years old this year, was buried in the eastern Logar province.

Mazar-i-Sharif was the first major city to fall to the Alliance as they pushed the Taliban out of much of Afghanistan.

Namangani, the military commander of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), was spearheading a militant campaign to end the secular rule of Uzbek President Islam Karimov from bases in Afghanistan which until this month were under Taliban control.

Founded in 1998 in Mazar-i-Sharif, the IMU was considered a threat to the stability of the ex-Soviet states of Central Asia.

Linked to the al Qaeda network, the IMU wants a Taliban-style Islamic caliphate in the fertile Fergana Valley, where the Central Asian states Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan meet.

Namangani and the IMU also were blamed for a series of bomb attacks in the Uzbek capital Tashkent in February 1999, which were seen as an assassination attempt on President Karimov.

He was sentenced to death in absentia last November for his part in the bombings.

After the Tashkent bombings in 1999, Namangani largely dropped out of sight, but was believed to divide his time between Tajikistan and Afghanistan.

The Uzbek government accused him of being behind a series of armed incursions in the summers of 1999 and 2000 from Tajikistan into Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan which left dozens of state troops dead.—Reuters