Pakistan summoned the US Chargé d'Affaires in Islamabad on Tuesday after President Donald Trump's tweets on Pakistan's role in fighting terrorism and the capture of Osama bin Laden.
"The Foreign Secretary called in the US CdA Ambassador Paul Jones to register a strong protest on the unwarranted and unsubstantiated allegations made against Pakistan. Rejecting the insinuations about OBL [Osama bin Laden], Foreign Secretary reminded the US CdA that it was Pakistan’s intelligence cooperation that provided the initial evidence to trace the whereabouts of OBL," Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that "baseless rhetoric about Pakistan was totally unacceptable":
The statement came shortly after Trump tweeted that Pakistan hadn't given 'anything to the US in return' for billions of dollars in aid, and suggested that Pakistani authorities knew al-Qaeda's ex-leader Osama bin Laden's whereabouts before his killing by US special forces in 2011 in a raid on his house in Pakistan.
Earlier, Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan took to the virtual space to blast Trump's remark, saying that he needed to learn such historical facts that no Pakistanis were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and that the country joined the US War on Terror, having suffered some 75,000 casualties:
POTUS also slammed the former special operations commander, Lt. Gen. William McRaven, for failing to capture bin Laden sooner than 2011.
Tensions between the two countries escalated after the US announced it would be cutting Pakistan's financial support by $800 million.