ISLAMABAD: A senior leader of the banned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the group’s former spokesman Mohammad Balti [Khorasani] has been killed in Nagarhar province of Afghanistan by unidentified armed persons.

Informed sources told Business Recorder that Khorasani, whose real name is Maulana Mohammad Ali Balti, was killed in an attack in Nagarhar, bordering Pakistan, by unidentified attackers.

The sources stated Khorasani, hailed from Chorbat Valley in Gilgit-Baltistan, was known in Taliban circles as Mufti Khalid, who also remained the Molvi Fazlullah-led TTP’s central spokesman when the militant group split into many factions due to internal differences.

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They said that Mohammad Khorasani was the one who had claimed responsibility of the 2014 Army Public School (APS), Peshawar attack over the phone and had also remained the in-charge of the TTP’s media and propaganda section.

Currently, he was hiding in Afghanistan along with other TTP militants who had fled the June 2014 operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan, launched against the local and foreign militants soon after the APS massacre, in which more than 150 schoolchildren and faculty members were martyred.

The sources maintained that Mohammad Khorasani was captured by the former Ashraf Ghani-led Afghanistan government and remained in jail till the Afghan Taliban took over the country on August 15, 2020. Consequently, many key TTP members were freed.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2022