**US and Pakistani officials have said they are checking reports that the leader of the Taliban in Pakistan, Baitullah Mehsud, has been killed.**He is said to have died in a missile attack on the home of a relative.
A US official said there was “reason to believe reports of his death may be true, but it cannot be confirmed”.
Family members have already confirmed that one of Mehsud’s wives was killed when a US drone attacked her father’s home in South Waziristan on Wednesday.
The area is a stronghold of Mehsud, who has been blamed by Pakistan for a series of suicide bomb attacks in the country.
About 2,000 people have died in such attacks across the country since July 2007, when government forces besieged and captured a radical mosque in Islamabad from Mehsud’s loyalists.
Since then the Taliban in Pakistan have claimed responsibility for some of the worst attacks, but have always denied any role in the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in December 2007.