AFP - The Pakistani Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud may be dead after a reported drone strike, a US official said on Thursday.

Pakistan: end of an era?

If confirmed, the death of Mehsud would be a coup for Washington, which has placed a five-million-dollar bounty on his head and branded him "a key Al-Qaeda facilitator" in Pakistan's tribal belt.

"There is some reason to believe Mehsud may be dead but it cannot be confirmed at this time for certain," the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.

Pakistani officials on Wednesday had said Mehsud's wife had been killed in an attack from an unmanned US aircraft, which regularly target Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan.

A senior Pakistani security official had told AFP that the target of the strike was the warlord Mehsud.

ABC television quoted unnamed US officials saying there was no physical evidence but there were "indicators" that Mehsud had been killed.

The officials said they hoped to secure DNA tests, ABC reported.

Pakistan on Sunday offered a 615,000-dollar reward for information leading to the capture, dead or alive, of Mehsud.

The burly Al-Qaeda-linked warlord, blamed for the deaths of hundreds of people in terror attacks over two years, has amassed influence from his fiefdom in the treacherous peaks of South Waziristan.

After an early education from a religious school in Miranshah in North Waziristan, Mehsud traveled to Afghanistan in the mid 1990s to fight alongside the Taliban movement as they battled for control of the war-torn country.

Upon his return, the Taliban in Pakistan were commanded by one-legged former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Abdullah Mehsud, who was killed when troops raided his hideout in southwestern Baluchistan province in July 2007.

Although relatively unknown at the time, Baitullah Mehsud -- now in his late 30s -- swiftly took his place and that same year he formed an umbrella organization of tribal militants named Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan.

Despite a string of peace deals with the government, Mehsud set up training camps for recruits, and extended his influence into the districts of North Waziristan and Bajaur and nearby cities of Tank and Dera Ismail Khan.

Taliban influence also spread from the long-troubled tribal belt stringing Afghanistan to the picturesque Swat valley to the northwest, which had been a peaceful holiday spot popular with foreigners and Pakistanis.

A wave of attacks linked to Islamist militants has killed 1,995 people around Pakistan since government forces fought gunmen holed up in the radical Islamabad Red Mosque in July 2007, sparking militant retaliation.

The government has blamed nearly 80 percent of the attacks on the Pakistan Taliban, including the December 2007 killing of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

Infuriated after the Swat Taliban advanced to within 100 kilometers (60 miles) of Islamabad in early April, the Pakistani military launched an offensive to dislodge militants from three northwest districts.