New militant group shares beheading video of Pakistani ‘spy’

Karachi : A new militant group, calling itself the “Majlis-e-Askari (Military Council)”, has reportedly shared a brutal video of a beheading of a man
purported to be a Pakistani “spy” in Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, media reports said.

In a gruesome two-minute video clip shared on social media by the group, the militants can be seen beheading the man before leaving the corpse and fleeing the scene, the Express Tribune reported.

The video was later allegedly shared by the militant group on social media which was then picked up and released by another little-known group, the “Ittehadul Mujahideen”.

However, the “Ittehadul Mujahideen” joined the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in criticising the beheading and also condemning recent similar beheadings in the districts of Bannu and Lakki Marwat.

Local sources have confirmed that the militant group is headed by the former TTP commander Akhtar Muhammad Khalil.

Khalil parted ways with Hafiz Gul Bahadur in the early 2000s, and had previously remained a member of the TTP’s shura, the sources added, Express Tribune reported.

The commander had served as the Gul Bhadur group’s North Waziristan amir but later developed differences with the outfit, especially over his ruthlessness.

Khalil had remained amongst the most brutal commanders and was known for beheading military and police officers between 2001 to 2009. He had later virtually disappeared from the scene, only to return again when the TTP leadership returned to merged districts of the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

The TTP had said in November that they have called off a ceasefire agreed with the federal government in June and ordered its militants to stage terrorist attacks across the country, a statement from the banned terror outfit said.

The TTP, a separate entity from the Taliban in Afghanistan but sharing a similar hardline ideology, has been responsible for hundreds of attacks and thousands of deaths since emerging in 2007, the Express Tribune reported.