New Delhi: Ehsanullah Ehsan, a top leader of the Tehreek-E-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), who had “surrendered” before the Pakistan army and the ISI on 17 April 2017, has “fled” from the safe house where he was being kept for the last two-and-a-half years.
The incident of “fleeing” took place on 11 January, Pakistan-based sources told The Sunday Guardian.
Sources said that soon after this incident, on 12 January, the Pakistan army swooped down on Ehsan’s native place in Sagibala village, Safi sub-division, Mohmand district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, and detained his father Sher Muhammad, brother Shafiq and his uncle Sher Badshah in order to get some information on the location of Ehsanullah Ehsan.
Ehsan’s wife and two daughters have gone underground and are untraceable.
In his “confessional” statement released by the Pakistan army on 26 April 2017, just days after he had “surrendered”, Ehsan had claimed that he was working for India’s external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW).
Just days after this, in 2017, Ehsanullah Ehsan was allowed to give a 30-minute interview to Pakistan’s Geo to push an anti-India propaganda and present a “water-tight” case against Indian national Kulbhushan Jadhav.
In December 2018, the Pakistan High Court, while hearing a case, had barred the government from giving clemency to Ehsan.
Sources in the Taliban who had spoken to this newspaper in 2017, had said that though the Pakistan army had presented him before the media on 17 April 2017, Ehsan was picked up on 7 March 2017 by ISI-backed individuals from Paktika province of Afghanistan along with three others.
Ehsan had gone incommunicado from the last week of January 2017 after he had spoken to this newspaper. At the time, he was stationed along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
TTP, through Ehsanullah Ehsan, had taken responsibility for the attack on Malala Yousafzai, who later got the Nobel Peace Prize and the 2014 Peshawar school massacre in which 150, mostly students, were killed.