COPENHAGEN, Sept 21: A Danish intelligence agent is missing after Saturday’s devastating suicide bomb attack on the Marriott hotel in Islamabad, Denmark’s foreign minister said on Sunday.
“We are talking about a member of the intelligence services stationed at the embassy in Islamabad, with no sign of life,” Per Stig Moeller told TV2 news channel.
“What we have heard is that a Dane likely figures among the dead. If that proves to be the case, it would be profoundly tragic,” he added, because he had been sent to Pakistan to improve security for Danish staff there.
The Danish intelligence agency, PET, said in a separate statement that one of its agents, a security adviser, had been posted missing, presumed dead. A second PET official was unhurt, it said.
Earlier, the foreign ministry’s head of diplomacy Klavs Holm told AFP that teams were scouring the city’s hospitals and other places looking for the missing national.
“Several other Danes were in the hotel, they have been slightly hurt” in the explosion, Holm said, adding that these people, three in number, were all employed by the Danish embassy in Islamabad.
In an impassioned interview with TV2, Denmark’s foreign minister also called on Arab nations to cooperate better with Western countries in combating the terror threat.
“We have to explain to the Muslim world (that they need to be) more alert and cooperate better with us (the West) to bring about an end to terrorism,” said Moeller.
Saturday’s suicide blast was “an attack on cooperation between Pakistan and the international community, because these Islamists, these fanatics, want to break relations between the West and the democratically-elected Pakistani government,” he added.
“The terrorists are so strong in Pakistan because they have given up on taking control of Iraq,” he added. “They are looking for places to destroy so as to influence other countries afterwards,” hence the need for closer cooperation.
“I say to the OIC (the 57-member state Organisation of the Islamic Conference) and the League (of Arab states): apply yourselves seriously to the task with us instead of having all manner of discussions on religion and other matters. We should be talking together about how to stop terrorism.”—AFP
