Taliban leader Mullah Omar may be dead, Afghan official says: Mullah Omar, the top leader of the Afghan Taliban

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Taliban leader Mullah Omar may be dead, Afghan official says: Mullah Omar, the top leader of the Afghan Taliban,...

(CNN) -- Mullah Omar, the top leader of the Afghan Taliban, has disappeared in the past five days, said Lutfullah Mashal, a spokesman for Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security. Mashal said he "hopes" Omar is dead but cannot confirm it.

"Our sources and senior Taliban members confirm that they can't contact him," Mashal said.
Omar was a rural Islamic cleric when became a leader of a group of students -- or "taliban" -- who took over Afghanistan in the early 1990s and established a hard-line Islamic fundamentalist regime that gave shelter to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network.