An American citizen who is described as a diplomat is some news account, a consular officer/employee in others and a technical adviser in CSM was reported to be involved in a shooting incident that killed two Pakistanis in the Lahore, Pakistan.
Via BBC:
An American diplomat in the Pakistani city of Lahore has shot and killed a Pakistani motorcycle rider and his pillion passenger, police say.
[...]
They say that the consular official fired his pistol in self-defence. US embassy officials confirmed that an American was involved.
The men were pursuing the American in his car when the incident happened.
A pedestrian was also killed by a speeding car from the US consulate which came to help, police say.
Via NPR and Wires:
A spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad confirmed that the staffer is an American who works at the consulate in Lahore, but could not identify his position.
[...]
Lahore police chief Aslam Tareen said the man was being questioned by the police and may be charged with both murder and illegally carrying a weapon: a Beretta pistol. The American shot both men after they pointed guns at him at an intersection, Tareen said.
[...]
Police said the two men, identified as Faisan Haider and Obaid Ur Rehman, were riding motorcycles when the consulate staffer opened fire. Local media quoted witnesses as saying that the men had been "chasing" the American's car when the shooting began, and police said they had recovered weapons carried by the dead men.
Read more here.
CNN in its report identified the area of the incident as the the busy Kartaba Chawk where "two "boys" on a motorcycle tried to rob him, quoting a police official named Faisal Rana.
Rana identified the American as Raymond Davis.
Alberto Rodriguez, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, confirmed that the man involved in the shooting is an employee of the U.S. consulate but did not confirm his identity.
The Skeptical Bureaucrat has a blog post on this curious incident here.
The Guardian writes:
Pakistan is considered one of the riskiest posts for American officials, who are posted at the Islamabad embassy and consulates in Karachi, Lahore and Peshawar.
A suicide bomber killed an official working for the National Security Agency outside the Karachi consulate in 2006. Gunmen in Peshawar killed an American aid official in 2008, and later that year opened fire on a vehicle carrying the consul general, who escaped unscathed.
Three US special forces officers were killed in a Taliban bomb attack in Khyber Paktunkhwa province last year.
Diplomats do not generally have permission to carry weapons although some are escorted by armed bodyguards. Security rules vary from city to city, with Lahore considered perhaps the least risky despite the threat from Punjabi militant groups.
We will update if we learn more.
1 comment:
This was a tough one ... my friend is the RSO there and I've been on the phone with his wife several times today... I don't know the depth of the story, but I know that when it hits this close to home, it makes me nervous for our friends representing our country.
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