The United States has shut down its consulate in lahore and evacuated its staff following a new terror threat that has prompted the State Department to issue an extensive advisory warning American citizens against travelling to Pakistan at this point.
Curiously enough, the Pakistan Government was reportedly not aware of any threat to the lahore consulate until the US authorities decided to immediately evacuate its diplomats, moving them to Islamabad.
Coincidentally, the US evacuation came on a day when Hafiz Saeed, the lashkar-e-Tayyeba founder and mastermind of the Mumbai terror attacks, openly led Eid prayers at lahore’s Gaddafi stadium. Saeed, who supposedly carries a $10 million US bounty on his head, has been roaming freely and carrying on his anti-India tirade.
In its warning, asking US citizens to defer all non-essential travel to Pakistan, the State Department spoke of “specific threats” to the lahore consulate. Officials said that except for a small number of emergency personnel, the diplomats have all been moved to Islamabad.
“The presence of several foreign and indigenous terrorist groups poses a potential danger to US citizens throughout Pakistan. Across the country, terrorist attacks frequently occur against civilian, government, and foreign targets. Attacks have included armed assaults on heavily guarded sites, including Pakistani military installations,” the advisory said.
It said the threat reporting indicates that terrorist groups “continue to seek opportunities to attack locations where US citizens and Westerners are known to congregate or visit”.
“Protests against the United States are not uncommon and have the potential to turn violent,” the advisory said, stressing that “terrorists and criminal groups regularly resort to kidnapping for ransom”.
“We have picked up what we regard as a threat worthy of taking this action,” a senior US official told CNN. But Pakistan’s Interior Ministry spokesman Omar Hameed Khan reportedly told the network that Islamabad was not aware of any threat to the consulate till the US authorities ordered the evacuation.
Pakistan, for some reason, did not figure in the list of 20-odd US embassies and consulates across much of the Muslim world that have been shut down for the whole of this week following an earlier terror alert. That directive predominantly covered missions in North Africa and the Middle East, but it also included the ones in Bangladesh and Afghanistan, albeit for just one day last Sunday.
The US action in lahore came just a day after bombers struck a funeral in western Pakistan and a graveyard across the border in Afghanistan, killing at least 44 people.