Nab top five militants by July: U.S. to Pak

Pakistan was given time till July to capture al Qaeda leader Ilyas Kashmiri and Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar else the U.S. threatened to barge in with another military offensive, media reports said.

Last week the U.S. handed over a list of five terrorists that also included names of al Qaeda’s second-in-command Ayman al Zawahiri, the operating chief of Haqqani network Sirajuddin Haqqani and the Libyan operations chief of al Qaeda Atiya Abdel Rahman.

Seeking immediate intelligence information on them, the U.S. reportedly asked Pakistan to capture them by July or else expect an unilateral operation, like the one with which they killed al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, in North Waziristan.

A source of great tension in ties between the two nations, bin Laden was killed in a covert operation on May 2 in Pakistan?s Abbottabad by Americans, without informing the local administration. While Pakistan warned against a repeat show, a defiant U.S. said they would do it again if they have to.

The new list was discussed during two meetings between Pakistani and US officials in the past two weeks, and also during U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s talks with Pakistani leaders in Islamabad on Friday, ABC News quoted a US official as saying.

The report said that the U.S. views the list and the July deadline, which coincides with the scheduled pullout of NATO and allied troops from Afghanistan, as a test of whether Pakistan is “serious about fighting terrorists who have long enjoyed safe havens within its borders”.