WASHINGTON — A Pakistani militant who planned a devastating truck bomb attack on a hotel in Islamabad in 2008 — which left two members of the American military and dozens of others dead — was killed in recent days by an American drone strike in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said on Saturday night.
The militant, Qari Yasin, had ties to the Pakistani Taliban, who are closely aligned with Al Qaeda, and had been linked to other terrorist plots, including one against Sri Lanka’s national cricket team.
The American strike that killed him took place on March 19 in Paktika Province, an area where many of Pakistani Taliban operatives have operated after slipping across the border in advance of the Pakistani Army’s offensive in North Waziristan in 2014.
The strike illustrates how the American battle against Qaeda operatives and their terrorist allies has continued even as the United States increases its fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The September 2008 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad was one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in Pakistan’s history.
More than 50 people were killed when a six-wheel dump truck carrying explosives blew up at the entrance of the hotel, which was a prominent meeting place for foreigners and leading Pakistanis. Among the dead were Maj. Rodolfo I. Rodriguez of the United States Air Force and Matthew J. O’Bryant, a cryptologic technician and a third class petty officer in the Navy. More than 260 people were wounded.
Investigators said later that more than 1,300 pounds of explosives had been used in the attack, which created a crater that was 60 feet wide and 25 feet deep.
The attack took place a few hundred yards from the prime minister’s house, where the government’s leaders were dining at the time.
Mr. Yasin was also linked to a 2009 attack in which gunmen using rifles, grenades and rockets assaulted a bus that was transporting the Sri Lanka cricket team in Lahore, Pakistan. Six Pakistani police officers and two civilians were killed, and half a dozen members of the cricket team were wounded, including a British coach. Since then, Pakistan has been forced to play most of its home matches in the United Arab Emirates.
News agencies reported this past week that an American drone strike had killed Mr. Yasin, attributing the information to Pakistani security officials and Islamist militants. But the Pentagon did not confirm the attack until Saturday night.
“The death of Qari Yasin is evidence that terrorists who defame Islam and deliberately target innocent people will not escape justice,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in a statement.
The Pakistani Taliban, formally known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, are part of a loose and increasingly divided umbrella organization that once represented roughly 30 groups of militants. The organization was officially founded in 2007 by a prominent jihadist commander, Baitullah Mehsud, and for years it and allied groups like Al Qaeda have been based in the Pashtun tribal areas in northwestern Pakistan, particularly in North and South Waziristan.
The movement shares a close relationship with the Haqqani network, the most hard-core affiliate of the Afghan Taliban, which have been behind repeated suicide attacks in and around Kabul and eastern Afghanistan. The groups also cooperate and provide haven for Qaeda operatives, including Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.
In addition to the attack on the Marriott Hotel, the Pakistani Taliban in 2012 shot Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani schoolgirl in the Swat Valley, for her advocacy of education for girls. Ms. Yousafzai went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 and has become a worldwide symbol of the group’s indiscriminate violence and subjugation of women and girls.
A Pakistani Taliban spokesman also claimed responsibility for the failed car-bomb attack by Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, in Times Square in May 2010.
Another prominent attack was an audacious siege on Karachi’s international airport in June 2014. The strike, in which a group of 10 attackers fought security forces for hours and killed 13 people, represented the final straw for Pakistan’s military. Within days, a major air and ground assault began against Taliban leaders headquartered in North Waziristan.
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