Khalid said he had received fresh information about the status of Mahmud and insisted that he was still alive, The Star reported.
Earlier today, media outlets said Mahmud, who helped finance the ongoing siege by extremists in Marawi City, was believed to have been killed in fighting there.
“It is not true, and we believe that he is still in Marawi City fighting with the insurgents there,” Khalid told reporters at a breaking of fast event at Masjid Nurul Iman, Kampung Gebok, near Mantin, this evening.
Singapore’s Straits Times (ST) had quoted General Eduardo Año of the Philippine military as saying that Mahmud had died on June 7 after being wounded in the fighting in Marawi last month.
The report said Malaysian counter-terrorism authorities could not confirm if Mahmud had died as his body had not been found.
Mahmud, also known as Abu Handzalah, was said to have assumed a leadership role among the Maute militants in the Philippines, who have links to the Islamic State terrorist group.
The ST report said Mahmud was believed to have been designated as a successor of Isnilon Hapilon, named as head of IS’ Southeast Asia wing.
Mahmud and his right-hand man Mohd Najib Husen, who was killed in the Philippines much earlier, were identified as the chief recruiters in Malaysia for IS.
Mahmud was also responsible for training and sending militants to fight in Syria and Iraq.
Among those he had recruited was Malaysia’s first suicide bomber, Ahmad Tarmimi Maliki.
Mahmud himself had received training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan under Osama bin Laden while studying at Pakistan’s Islamabad Islamic University in the late 1990s.
He returned to Malaysia to lecture at Universiti Malaya. After being exposed as a militant by Malaysian police in 2014, he fled to the Philippines.