Peshawar, Pakistan: A former Pakistani intelligence officer considered a 'godfather' of the Afghan Taliban but kidnapped by Islamists has died of a heart attack in captivity, a government official said.
Sultan Amir Tarar, known as 'Colonel Imam', was seized by Islamist rebels last March with another ex-spy and a British journalist in the lawless northwest border district of North Waziristan, a key militants' hideout.
Tariq Hayat, the top administrative official for the tribal areas of Pakistan, said district officials had informed him of Tarar's death.
"I was told by the political administration of North Waziristan that he died from a heart attack," Hayat told AFP.
"He died from a heart attack, but I will say that he was killed by the Taliban because he was a heart patient and if you don't provide medicine to a heart patient you are going to kill him," he said, adding that his body had not been recovered.
Military and intelligence officials could not confirm his death.
Tarar was captured along with British filmmaker Asad Qureshi and Khalid Khawaja, another former agent for Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).
Khawaja was found dead last April with a note on his body accusing him of spying for the United States, while Qureshi was released in September.
The tribal areas are the stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban, allied with al-Qaeda and responsible for leading a wave of bombings that has killed more than 4,000 people nationwide in the past three-and-a-half years.
Tarar became well known through his support for Afghan mujahideen groups fighting the Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1989 and he later helped to train the Afghan Taliban movement that came to power in Kabul in 1996.
Deemed very close to the Afghan Islamists' command and its spiritual leader Mullah Omar, he was considered a "godfather" of the movement.
After retiring from his work with the ISI, Tarar had lived in Rawalpindi, where he regularly received visits from the media and openly supported the Afghan Taliban fighting US-led NATO forces since late 2001.
Intelligence officials told AFP that the trio had been kidnapped by a militant group calling themselves the Asian Tigers and were later handed over to the Pakistani Taliban's Punjabi branch, known as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
In a video uploaded to YouTube before his death, Tarar is seen naming his abductors.
"I Sultan Amir Tarar, known by the name of Colonel Imam, am in the captivity of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi Al-Almi Abdullah Mansour group," he said.