WASHINGTON: The United States has refused to blame Pakistan for the terrorist attack in Ohio, saying it would not like to prejudge an incident that was still under investigation.

At a news briefing on Thursday, a journalist claimed that a Somali student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, who carried out a car-and-knife attack at the Ohio State University campus, had received training in Pakistan.

But US State Department’s deputy spokesman Mark Toner said the attack was still under investigation and refused to “address some of the assumptions in [the journalist’s] question with regard to the motivation behind these actions or where these people may have received any sort of training”.

The journalist referred to a Twitter campaign against Pakistan claiming that the Pakistan Embassy in Washington and the consulate in New York were raided to look for Artan’s alleged links to Pakistan.

An impersonator claiming to be Pakistan’s ambassador in the US posted the tweet, claiming that American authorities had raided the embassy over the Ohio attack.

The embassy in Washington acted prom­ptly when the tweet first appeared on Tues­day and got it disabled by informing Twitter Inc.

But the impersonator was back again on Wednesday, this time with another false claim that it was the Pakistan consulate in New York, and not the embassy in Washington, that was raided. Consulate officials also got the tweet removed by informing the relevant authorities.

However, on both occasions, the US-based Indian media added to the alarm by publishing the claim as a news story without checking the facts.

The story claimed that since Artan had lived in Pakistan for seven years before coming to the United States, US authorities raided the Pakistan embassy and the consulate to check their records.

The story — displayed prominently on several news sites — alarmed the Pakistani-American community, causing many to call the embassy to verify the news. This forced the embassy to issue a clarification, telling the public that the story was false.

“Some fake Twitter accounts are spreading baseless and inauthentic information through tweets by impersonating the Embassy of Pakistan and the Pakistan Ambassador to US Jalil Abbas Jilani,” said the embassy’s spokeswoman Zoobia Masood when asked for comments.

“These fake accounts are not linked with the Pakistan Embassy and the matter has been duly taken up with the Twitter administration for blocking the unauthorised accounts,” she added.

Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2016