The US State Department has warned Americans not to travel to Pakistan and evacuated nonessential government personnel from the country’s second largest city because of a specific threat to the consulate there, a US official said on Friday.
The move was not related to the threat of an al Qaeda attack that prompted Washington to close temporarily 19 diplomatic posts in Middle East and Africa, the US officials said.
According to US Embassy spokeswoman Meghan Gregonis, the US is shifting its nonessential staff from the consulate in Lahore to the capital, Islamabad.
Emergency personnel will stay in Lahore, and embassy officials do not know when the consulate will reopen, she said.
“We received information regarding a threat to the consulate,” said Gregonis. “As a precautionary measure, we are undertaking a drawdown of all except emergency personnel.”
The consulate in Lahore was already scheduled to be closed for Eid from Thursday through Sunday.
US consulates have been attacked in Pakistan previously. Most recently, a car bomb and grenade attack against the US Consulate in Peshawar in 2010 that killed four Pakistanis.
The personnel drawdown at the Lahore consulate was precautionary and wasn’t related to the recent closures of numerous US diplomatic missions in the Muslim world, said two US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, The Washington Post said.
None of the consulates in Pakistan or the US Embassy in Islamabad were affected by the earlier closures.
On Thursday, the State Department issued a travel warning, saying the presence of several foreign and indigenous terrorist groups posed a potential danger to US citizens throughout Pakistan.
The country has faced a bloody insurgency by the Pakistani Taliban and their allies in recent years that has killed over 40,000 civilians and security personnel, and is also believed to be home base for al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri.
Most of the militant attacks have been in the northwest and southwest along the border with Afghanistan.
Lahore is considered Pakistan’s cultural capital and has a population of at least 10 million people.
Islamabad has also been under high alert in recent days because of intelligence received by the Pakistani government that militants were planning attacks on key targets in the city, including the airport and parliament. There was no indication that the militants were planning attacks on US targets in the capital.
“We will continue to evaluate the threats to Sanaa and Lahore and make subsequent decisions about the reopening of those facilities based on that information,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement.
“We will also continue to evaluate information about these and all of our posts and to take appropriate steps to best protect the safety of our personnel, American citizens traveling overseas and visitors to our facilities,” she added.
Most of al Qaeda’s core leadership is alleged to reside in Pakistan. Lahore is known to be home to other extremists sympathetic to the group, a CNN report said.
All but one of the US diplomatic posts closed last week in a sweeping response to fears of a possible al Qaeda attack were reopened on Sunday.
The embassy in Sanaa Yemen, where al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in based, will remain closed because of continued concerns about a possible attack.
