The United States does not know if the leader of Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed by a drone strike earlier this week, a senior American envoy said on Saturday. Pakistani officials have said a US drone fired two missiles on Thursday at a compound in north-west Pakistan where Mehsud was believed to have been; but his fate was not known.

"I've heard every conceivable version of what's happened and I don't know," the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, said. "But if he's still alive he's one of the worst people on earth. Absolutely vicious," Holbrooke told reporters during a visit here.

Holbrooke is visiting Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of "routine" consultations with their governments, his office said. If Hakimullah was killed, it could provide a much-needed boost to both Pakistan and the United States, which lost seven CIA employees to a suicide bomber in Afghanistan on December 30, the second deadliest attack in the agency's history. The bomber posed with Mehsud in a video that was released after the attack.

Copyright Reuters, 2010