Sami Sadat, former commander of Afghan special forces, said that US and Taliban officials have lied about killing the mastermind of the ISIS attack on Kabul airport.

Sadat said that the ISIS mastermind is alive and leads intelligence arm of the Islamic State – Khorasan (IS-K).

The former Afghan army general stressed that the ISIS mastermind is Abdullah Omar Bajawari and added that “Zalmay Khalilzad and the Taliban are lying as usual”.

Sadat emphasised that closing the case of killing 173 Afghan citizens and 13 American soldiers is "disgraceful and disturbing" when the killer is still alive.

Earlier, Zalmay Khalilzad, the former US envoy for Afghanistan’s peace affairs, had said that the Taliban has carried out deadly attacks against ISIS and has killed many of the group’s leaders in Afghanistan.

US military officials on Tuesday informed the father of a slain American soldier that the Taliban killed a high-ranking ISIS figure who played a key role in a suicide attack on the US forces at Kabul Airport in August 2021.

The father of the American soldier said that the authorities did not provide information about the identity of the ISIS member or how he has been killed.

An American official quoted the Taliban as saying that the group was not aware of the fact the dead ISIS member was involved in the Kabul airport suicide attack.

The attack on the Kabul airport took place during the last days of the withdrawal of American soldiers from Afghanistan.