11:52am UK, Wednesday October 01, 2008

Alex Crawford, Asia correspondent

The Pakistani authorities and the Taliban are engaged in a propaganda battle over the fate of Baitullah Mehsud – the man accused of planning a string of suicide attacks across the country including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Baitullah Mehsud speaking to reporters in Waziristan in May

A spokesman for the Taliban leader told Sky News he was alive and well and reports of his death were “media propaganda”.

But the Pakistani authorities are claiming Mehsud has died of renal failure.

The news of the Taliban leader’s death was initially reported on the Pakistani independent television station Geo TV.

If true, it would be a big blow for the Pakistani Taliban, although he would be quickly replaced by another leader.

He heads the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or the Taliban Movment of Pakistan. He was blamed by the authorities when Pervez Musharraf was president for the death of Ms Bhutto as she was leaving a rally in Rawalpindi on December 27, 2007.

He always denied the claim and this fuelled conspiracy theories that somehow rogue elements of the ISI – the Pakistan intelligence – were involved in Ms Bhutto’s death.

Mehsud is notoriously reclusive and very rarely gives interviews, although he did talk to a number of Pakistani journalists this May. He did not allow filming of his face or any photographs but the reporters were permitted to ask him questions and film him from behind.

So what do we know about him?

He is in his mid-thirties and was named by Time magazine as one of the top 100 most influential figures in the world. He’s been called more dangerous than Osama bin Laden by Newsweek – and Musharraf and the American CIA said he was the mastermind behind Bhutto’s death.

The journalists who met him in South Waziristan, in Pakistan’s tribal belt, describe him as courteous, slightly plump, short and earnest.

He has had reported illnesses before and is known to be a diabetic but his spokesman, Maulvi Omar, insisted this morning the leadership was fine and healthy.

The Pakistan military told journalists last week on a trip to the restive Bajaur Region, which borders Afghanistan and where a full-scale offensive has been ongoing since August, that they had killed five of the top militant commanders.

When asked why they had not managed to find or attack Mehsud himself, the Inspector General of the Frontier Corps, Major General Tariq Khan said: “He has been lucky, or we have been unlucky, however you want to look at it.”

He said Pakistani troops had killed more than a thousand militants over the past two weeks.

Major General Khan said the militants were using civilians as human shields, that they had a flow of foreign money which was funding their activities and that they had integrated houses into their defence system at the same time as using strong propaganda.

Their operations, he said, were heavily dependant on the drug and opium trade.

He described Bajaur as the “centre of gravity” as far as the militants were concerned and went on to say: “If they lose this, they lose everything.”