Islamabad, April 21: Despite Pakistan’s calls for a drastic cut in the number of CIA agents on its soil, a large number of such agents are still operating in the Asian country, a Pakistani lawyer says.
“There is a large number of people who are non-Pakistanis most [of whom] are from the US. [Their] papers are not in order, some of them are expired; their visas might have expired and they are still in Pakistan,” Yasmeen Ali, lawyer and university lecturer from Lahore,
She added that “there is a close scrutiny on these papers,” following the arrest of Raymond Davis, a CIA agent who gunned down two Pakistanis in Lahore back in January.
Davis was released after the relatives of the Pakistani victims received up to USD 2.3 million in “blood money” compensation.
The demand for cutting the CIA presence in Pakistan had been ordered by the country’s powerful Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani earlier this month.
According to a New York Times report, the US officials have, however, made no pledges to curtail covert operations in Pakistan or to give the Pakistani government or its intelligence agency a roster of American spies operating in the country.
——-Agencies