WASHINGTON: The US State Department has announced that it has added the name of Bahawal Khan, the new leader of a Pakistan-based militant group that has carried out terrorist attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, to its list of specially designated global terrorists.
That step freezes any assets Bahawal Khan may have in US jurisdictions and bars Americans from any transactions with him.
The department said that Khan runs the Commander Nazir Group, which has run training camps, dispatched suicide bombers, provided safe haven for al Qaeda fighters and conducted cross-border operations in Afghanistan since 2006.
The group is named after Mullah Nazir, a Taliban member whose faction agreed to a cease-fire with the Pakistan military in 2009 but then broke it in 2011. Nazir was killed in a US drone strike in January.
Nazir was the main militant commander in South Waziristan, part of the northwestern tribal belt considered a base for al Qaeda, the Taliban and other Islamist militants, and a powerful elder in the Wazir tribe.
He, as well as North Waziristan commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur, was understood to be close to the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network, a faction of the Afghan Taliban blamed for some of the most high-profile attacks in Afghanistan.
Bahawal Khan is reported to be aged 34 and an illiterate former bus driver.
He is a long-time associate of Mullah Nazir, a Taliban member whose faction agreed to a cease-fire with the Pakistan military in 2009 but then broke it in 2011. Nazir was killed in a US drone strike in January.
The two men fought together alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan before the 2001 US invasion.
