Imran Khan's party 'outs' top CIA operative in Pakistan

The political party of former cricketer Imran Khan has identified a man it described as the CIA's top spy in Pakistan, in an escalation of a campaign to end US drone strikes in the country.

In a letter to the Pakistani police, Khan's information secretary, Shireen Mazari, accused CIA director John Brennan, along with a man identified as the agency's Islamabad station chief, of "committing murder and waging war against Pakistan".

Mazari demanded that the authorities prevent the station chief, whose identity has not yet been confirmed, from leaving the country so that he could face prosecution.

The move is expected to infuriate US officials, who had to recall a previous CIA station chief in 2010 after he was identified in local media, also in relation to a lawsuit brought by anti-drone campaigners.

But while blame for that outing was placed on tensions between the CIA and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, this time it appears to be driven more by Khan's increasingly confrontational stance against drone strikes.

In a television appearance on Wednesday, Khan said he had named the station chief essentially to punish the CIA for a deadly drone strike this month in the province his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party controls, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Now, he said, it was up to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's government to take the next step against the US spy agency.