Pakistan prevents US diplomat from leaving

PAKISTANI authorities have barred a US diplomat involved in a fatal traffic accident from leaving the country, forcing an American military aircraft flown in for his departure to leave without him, local media said on Saturday.

The move came a day after Pakistan said it would restrict the movements of all American diplomats in the country in response to Washington’s similar curbs on Pakistani embassy diplomats.

A spokesman for the US embassy in Islamabad declined to comment on the media reports, and a US State Department spokesperson in Washington would neither confirm nor deny them.

“For the privacy and security of those involved, we cannot disclose the diplomat’s current location,” the State Department spokesperson said.

Pakistan is a crucial link to supplying American troops fighting the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan. The latest blow to relations came on Saturday, when Pakistani authorities banned a US military attache from leaving as planned, Pakistan’s The Nation and Express Tribune newspapers reported.

A day earlier, an Islamabad court had ruled his diplomatic immunity may not apply in the April 7 traffic accident in which the US attache’s vehicle hit a motorcycle, killing the 22-year-old driver, both papers said.

As a result, a US Air Force C130 flown in to Pakistan’s Nur Khan air base outside Islamabad was forced to leave without him on Friday, Geo TV and the two newspapers said.

Separately, Pakistan’s foreign ministry said it would apply travel curbs to all US diplomatic staff similar to those applied by Washington, said a notification sent to the US Embassy on Friday.

The new US rules require diplomats to obtain permission to travel more than 40 kilometers from their stations, the local Dawn newspaper reported.

The US State Department on Saturday confirmed the new curbs on its employees in Pakistan.