An American member of Al-Qaeda on Saturday issued a video denying the organisation was behind a recent deadly string of attacks in Pakistan that have killed hundreds of civilians.

Adam Gadahn said in a video entitled “The Mujahideen Don’t Target Muslims” that the organisation was being framed by the United States and Pakistan and blamed the media for helping implicate Al-Qaeda in the attacks.

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“The mujahideen have condemned, and continue to condemn, all attacks which indiscriminately kill and wound innocent Muslims,” he said according to a transcript from US-based monitor IntelCenter.

Pakistan has been hit by a wave of deadly attacks blamed on Islamist extremists as the military presses a major offensive against Taliban fighters in their strongholds on the Afghan border.

October and early November saw a fierce surge in strikes, including a huge suicide car bombing on October 28 in a Peshawar market that killed 125 people in the worst attack in Pakistan in two years.

This week 49 people were killed when two bombs devastated a market in Lahore, engulfing shops in flames and burying people under the rubble.

In the video, Gadahn refers to “un-Islamic bombings which target Muslims in their markets, mosques, schools, shops and streets”.

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“The mujahideen declare themselves innocent of these attacks, and pronounce them part of a cynical, calculated and clandestine international campaign by the secular political forces,” said Gadahn.

Born in 1978, Gadahn is a native of southern California and has appeared in several videotapes for Al-Qaeda since 2004.

A fierce Islamist insurgency has killed more than 2,670 people in attacks in Pakistan mostly blamed on the Taliban in the last two-and-a-half years.