Former Laotian general Vang Pao, who once commanded a CIA-backed secret army of Hmong guerrillas during the Vietnam War, has died in a Californian hospital. He was 81.

A spokeswoman for the Clovis Community Medical Center near San Francisco said that he was hospitalised on the 26th of December.

A general in the Royal Lao army and member of the Hmong ethnic minority, Vang Pao ran an irregular army in the 1960s and 70s, commanding thousands of fighters in the US-funded covert war against Vietnamese and Lao communist forces.

He fled to the United States in 1975 after communists ousted Laos’ royal rulers, and was credited with helping to negotiate the resettlement in America of tens of thousands of fellow Hmong.

Charlie Waters, one of his closest friends, said Vang Pao died after being admitted to hospital with pneumonia, complicated by heart problems.

But he said the former general had been active until the last for the local Hmong community, which numbers some 30,000 to 40,000 in California. Tens of thousands of Hmong also live in the northern state of Minnesota.