Britain’s Prince Harry, who compared shooting insurgents in Afghanistan to playing video games, “has probably developed a mental problem”, the Taliban said on Tuesday.

“There are 49 countries with their powerful military failing in the fight against the mujahideen, and now this prince comes and compares this war with his games, PlayStation or whatever he calls it,” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told AFP.In a recently released interview, Prince Harry had joked that he honed his weapons’ pilot skills playing PlayStation and Xbox computer games.

He also revealed that he had killed Afghan insurgents during sorties against the Taliban while on his second tour of duty in Afghanistan where he was a gunner in Apache attack helicopters.Queen Elizabeth’s 28-year-old grandson, third in line to the British throne, will return home later this week after a 20-week posting with Nato forces at the CampBastion military base in the southern province of Helmand.

Asked before he left Afghanistan if he had killed insurgents during his tour, he said: “Yeah, so, lots of people have … Yes, we fire when we have to, take a life to save a life, but essentially we’re more of a deterrent than anything else.”He added, “If there’s people trying to do bad stuff to our guys, then we’ll take them out of the game, I suppose.”

The Taliban had said it would do its utmost to kidnap or kill Harry during his tour, and an Afghan insurgent warlord labelled him a drunken “jackal” out to kill innocent Afghans.His base was attacked on his birthday last September, but it was never clear if he was the target or if the Taliban raid, in which two US marines were killed, was in response to the anti-Islam film, “Innocence of Muslims”.

Known in the military as Captain Harry Wales, he was deployed to Afghanistan four months ago, shortly after pictures of him frolicking naked with a nude woman at a hotel in Las Vegas were published around the world.I probably let myself down, I let my family down, I let other people down,” he said of the Vegas incident. “But it was probably a classic example of me being too much army, and not enough prince.”