The key leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, was killed by an American drone strike, the Afghan intelligence agency said. The fact that yet another ‘most wanted terrorist’ has been bumped off by the US on Pakistani soil hasn’t gone unnoticed in India.

There was some uncomfortable silence from Pakistan till late last night. Could it be possible that they didn’t know exactly how to react? Did the US infringe on their sovereignty? Were they  to take credit for being the good guys who supported the US in eliminating this terrorist who appeared to be  quite freely roaming around Baluchistan.

Some Taliban commanders vehemently denied that Mullah Mansour was present in the area of the strike, which occurred yesterday near the Afghan border in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, but a statement from the intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, was unambiguous.

“Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, the leader of the Taliban group, was killed around 3.45pm yesterday as a result of an airstrike in Dalbandin area of Baluchistan Province in Pakistan,” the statement said. “He had been under close surveillance for a while, until his vehicle was struck and destroyed on the main road in the Dalbandin area.”

The US did not offer confirmation of its own.

“We are confident, but at this point we do not have indisputable facts that he is dead,” Brig. Gen. Charles H. Cleveland, a spokesman for American forces in Afghanistan, said.

Pakistan was not informed of the strike beforehand, said a senior US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Pakistan’s foreign ministry issued a statement today denouncing the attack as a violation of the country’s sovereignty. In the statement, the ministry said a man carrying a Pakistani passport under the name of Wali Muhammad was targeted in the strike along with his driver. It was not immediately clear if either was Mullah Mansour.

Secretary of state John Kerry, speaking today in Naypyidaw, the capital of Myanmar (Burma), was the first senior official to talk about the targeted attack. He repeatedly referred to Mansour in the past tense.

Asked if Pakistan had been kept in the dark about the operation until it was complete – which is what happened with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 – Kerry said he would not say “when we communicated”. But he indicated that he had talked with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif today morning after the strike was announced.

“We have long said that Mansour posed an imminent threat to us and to Afghan civilians,” Kerry said. “This action sends a clear message to the world that we will continue to work with our Afghan partners.” Kerry suggested that the attack would not derail peace talks, because he said Mansour had been opposed to any such negotiations.

The news could also be a boost to the struggling government of President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan, as the Barack Obama administration has finally carried out what the US had been reluctant to for 15 years: a strike against the Afghan Taliban in their sanctuaries in Pakistan.

  Myanmar, Osama bin laden, pakistan, Taliban, US