JNN 19 Jan 2011 : Afghanistan’s Taliban leader has reportedly had a heart attack and received treatment in a Pakistani hospital with the help of Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

The daily Washington Post reported that Mullah Omar had a heart attack on January 7 and was taken to a Karachi hospital where he remained for several days, receiving treatment.

The article said that Omar was taken to the hospital by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, ISI.

A physician in the Karachi hospital, who was not identified in the report, said he saw Omar struggling to recover from an operation to put a stent – an artificial tube – in his heart.

“While I was not personally in the operating theater,” the physician said, “my evaluation based on what I have heard, and seeing the patient in the hospital, is that Mullah Omar had a cardiac catheter complication resulting in either bleeding, or a small cerebral vascular incident, or both.”

“After the operation, there seemed to be some brain damage with Mullah Omar having slurred speech,” the physician added.

US officials said they could not immediately verify the report.

“No one on this end has heard this,” said a US official from Kabul. “It doesn’t mean it’s not true — we just have no information to confirm or dispute these facts.”

Pakistan’s Ambassador to the US Husain Haqqani has rejected the report as baseless.

Mullah Omar has been in hiding since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan, which toppled the Taliban regime.