Pakistan’s state-owned carrier has drawn widespread criticism for posting an ad showing a plane flying towards the Eiffel Tower.
The ad was meant to promote Pakistan International Airlines’ resumption of flights to the French capital and was headlined “Paris, we’re coming today”.
Some social media users noted the ad’s similarity to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
“Is this an advertisement or a threat?” one user wrote on X. Another called on the company to “fire your marketing manager.”
The image has been viewed more than 21 million times on X since it was posted last week and sparked a swift backlash.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered an inquiry into the matter, while Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar also criticized the ad, Pakistan’s Geo News reported.
The The September 11 attacks saw hijackers crash passenger planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington DC, killing nearly 3,000 people.
The alleged organizer of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was arrested in Pakistan in 2003.
Osama bin Laden, the leader of the extremist al-Qaeda network that planned the attacks, was killed by American soldiers in Pakistan in 2011.
Pakistani journalist Omar Quraishi said he was “truly speechless” by the PIA ad.
“Didn’t the airline management check this?
“Do they not know about the tragedy of 9/11 – where the planes attacked the buildings? Did they not think it would be perceived in a similar way,” he wrote on X.
The airline did not comment on the incident.
PIAs, however, are no strangers to controversy.
Some X users pointed out that in 1979 the airline ran an ad showing the shadow of a passenger plane over the Twin Towers.
In 2017, the airline was ridiculed after staff sacrificed a goat to ward off bad luck after one of the biggest air crashes in the country.
And in 2019, PIA caused an uproar when it told flight attendants to lose weight or get grounded. Staff were told they had six months to shed the “extra pounds”.
