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Pakistan’s flag carrier has come under fire for airing an ad showing a plane flying towards the Eiffel Tower.
The ad was to promote the resumption of flights to the French capital by Pakistan International Airlines and was titled “Paris, we come today”.
Some social media users pointed out the ad’s resemblance to the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
“Is this an advertisement or a threat?” a user wrote in X. Another asked the company to “fire your marketing manager.”
The image has been viewed more than 21 million times since it was posted on X last week and has sparked a swift backlash.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has ordered an inquiry into the matter, while Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar has also criticized the ad, Pakistan’s Geo News reported.
The 9/11 attacks hijackers crashed 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.
Suspected mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was arrested in Pakistan in 2003.
Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Al-Qaeda extremist network that organized the attacks, was killed by US troops in Pakistan in 2011.
Pakistani journalist Omar Quraishi said the PIA announcement left him “really speechless”.
“Didn’t the airline management check this?
“Don’t they know about the tragedy of 9/11, which used airplanes to attack buildings? Didn’t they think it would be perceived in a similar way,” he wrote in X.
The airline has not commented on the incident.
PIA, however, is no stranger 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 mocked for going after its employees he sacrificed a goat to ward off bad luck after one of the worst air disasters in the country.
And in 2019, PIA created an uproar when it told flight attendants to slim down or land. Workers were told they had six months to shed the “excess weight”.
