A top police officer of Pakistan's Peshawar city has been found dead in Afghanistan, 18 days after he was abducted to the war-torn country by unidentified militants, authorities said Wednesday.
Superintendent of Police (Peshawar) Tahir Khan Dawar left his residence in Islamabad for an evening walk on October 27 but did not return home.
His mobile phone's last location was traced somewhere in Jhelum city of Punjab province. After being contacted, he said that he was fine and there was no threat to his life.
The Islamabad police had constituted various teams to trace him.
Peshawar city police in a statement said that the officer had been on a short leave to Islamabad to meet his family.
His abductors released a picture of him along with a letter of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan's Khurasani group claiming responsibility for the kidnapping and the killing.
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Information Minister of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Shaukat Yusafzai said that Dawar was ruthlessly killed by the abductors in Afghanistan. He was in captivity for 18 days.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry has confirmed the recovery of a body with the service card of Dawar.
The ministry has informed the Pakistan Embassy in Kabul that the body was found by local people in Dur Baba district of Nangarhar province Tuesday.
The body, being transferred to Jalalabad by the Afghan authorities, was yet to be received by the Consul General of Pakistan in Jalalabad. It would be subsequently transferred to Pakistan via Torkham border.
TTP Spokesman Muhammad Khalid khurasani has denied that Dawar was killed by the Taliban.
In a statement, he said that some journalists for cheap popularity attributed the murder of the Pakistani police officer to the TTP.
He said that the TTP has its own channels and websites to claim responsibility of any incident.
"We are not afraid of anyone," he said, warning the journalists of dire consequences for attributing fabricated news to the TTP.
Though nobody claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and killing, the letter found along with the body carried the name of Wilayat Khorasan, which is used by the militants of the Islamic State (IS) for border regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The letter claimed that Dawar arrested and killed several militants and warned other officials of the same fate.
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