Mufti Abdul Mateen Qani took on as spokesperson of the Ministry of Interior in June 2023. Prior to this appointment, he served as the chief of staff to the deputy minister of intelligence at the General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI). Born in 1996, his family migrated to Pakistan when he was three years old. For a short period, the family lived in Miranshah, Pakistan's North Waziristan. He was educated in Islamic studies, initially in Peshawar and later at Darul-Oloom Zakaria in Islamabad. He then attended the Jamaat Rasheed religious school in Karachi, Pakistan, where he acquired proficiency in Arabic. He also studied “Ifta” in Akora Khattak, Pakistan. During the Taliban regime in the 1990s, his father, Mawlawi Abdul Ghiyas Qani, held prominent roles in the Taliban's regime, including as Deputy Minister of Agriculture and later as Minister of Labor and Social Affairs. The elder Qani, who reportedly played an important role in the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners during the U.S.-Taliban negotiations, is currently undergoing treatment in Qatar following a traffic accident in Afghanistan. It is also noteworthy that Abdul Mateen Qani is the nephew of the late Mullah Abdul Salam Sadat, a veteran Taliban commander. Before the Taliban's takeover, Mateen Qani resided in Qatar with his father, where he was a student of Islamic studies.
