ISLAMABAD: Though the United States on Saturday formally requested diplomatic immunity for an American who killed two people before a large number of people, the US itself has not granted similar immunity to even senior diplomats of other countries involved in such cases in the US, writes Ahmad Noorani.
Even a deputy ambassador of Georgia was sentenced to 21 years imprisonment merely for killing an American citizen in a road accident in Washington DC in 1997. In a tit-for-tat response, the Georgian government refused immunity to an American diplomat, Loren Wille, in 1999 and Wille was sentenced to 10 years in jail after he killed a Georgian translator in a road accident.
Experts in Pakistan were surprised by the American demand for diplomatic immunity for a technical assistant of a consulate who killed two Pakistani youth by a firearm when even in cases of road accidents the same immunity was not given by the US even to an ambassador.
The disclosure that the Lahore boys were hit by Raymond Davis’s bullets on their back has already raised serious doubts about the claim of self-defence being made by US Embassy and Davis himself.
In the 1997 case, Gueorgui Makharadze, the Georgian ambassador in Washington, had killed an American teenager in a road accident. The then US president Bill Clinton had flatly refused to grant diplomatic immunity to the Georgian diplomat and consequently Makharadze was sentenced to 21 years by a US court.
According to the New York Times, United States had exerted extreme pressure on the Georgian government to lift the diplomatic immunity for the ambassador even though it was not a deliberate shoot to death killing, but a car accident.
Washington’s reaction was similar when Pakistan’s New York-based permanent representative to the UN, Munir Akram, got involved in a case involving his live-in girlfriend. In a minor case of very little significance in 1982, a North Korean diplomat grabbed a woman’s breasts in a park in Eastchester, outside New York City and then took shelter in his country’s UN mission for 10 months before he finally pleaded guilty of a minor charge and then left the country.
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