Drone attack kills militant leader in Afghanistan

A militant leader blamed for several deadly bombings in Pakistan has been killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan, a spokesman for the extremist group has confirmed, report agencies.

Asad Mansoor, a spokesman for the Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA) militant group, told the Reuters news agency by telephone on Thursday that the leader, Omar Khalid Khorasani, died earlier in the day.

Eight other senior commanders of JuA were also reportedly killed in the drone strike on Khorasani.

The Pentagon has not yet officially commented on the report.

Khorasani was an alleged organiser of a December 2014 terrorist attack on a Peshawar school that killed 147 people, most of them children.

The JuA, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, also claimed responsibility for the 2016 bombing on Easter Sunday that killed 70 people, many of them Christians, in the Pakistani city of Lahore.