Islamabad, March 2 (IANS) The killing of at least 12 Pakistani citizens in Karachi by Marine Security Guards stationed inside the United States Consulate on Mai Kolachi Road marks another such episode on Pakistani soil, with Islamabad opting to contain the diplomatic fallout rather than pursue accountability, a report said on Monday.
The incident followed violent demonstrations over the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the joint US-Israel strike on Sunday.
According to a report in the media website ‘Brief,’ when Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi went on camera, he made no mention of the shootings.
“He called the day a day of mourning for the Muslim Ummah, acknowledged Pakistani grief over the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and asked citizens not to take the law into their own hands,” it added.
Similarly, Pakistan’s Sindh province Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah, the report said, “described the Consulate deaths as “extremely regrettable” and ordered an investigation he has no institutional capacity to conduct against a foreign military contingent protected by diplomatic cover. He then spent the remainder of his afternoon telephoning religious leaders and asking them to calm the public down.
Additionally, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, in his social media platform X, condemned Khamenei’s assassination as “a violation of international law and then, in the same breath, expressed concern over Pakistani protesters damaging US consulate property”.
Asserting that the Pakistani Foreign Office released no statement on the killings, the report further said, “No demarche was filed with the US Embassy. No ambassador was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Islamabad’s Constitution Avenue. No press secretary stood before cameras and used the words that the situation demanded: that American military personnel had shot and killed Pakistani citizens on Pakistani territory and that this government requires an accounting.”
The report emphasised that when a government denounces its own citizens for demonstrating against the killing of Pakistanis by foreign forces on its soil, it raises questions about whose interests the authorities are organised to serve.
“The protesters at the Consulate knew this before they arrived. The dead knew it too, in the way people who have grown up inside a system of managed subordination understand it without needing it explained. The grief was real. The bullets were real. The silence from the Foreign Office is real,” it stated.
–IANS
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