An American aid expert kidnapped at gunpoint from his home in the Pakistani city of Lahore was targeted because of his nationality, police said yesterday as they scrambled for leads.

Anti-American tensions are at an all-time high in Pakistan after a covert US raid killed Osama bin Laden on May 2.

The US embassy named the man as Warren Weinstein, who Pakistani police said is a senior official at US-based consultancy J.E. Austin, which works on development projects in the frontline state in the war on Al-Qaeda.

He was snatched at dawn on Saturday in the wealthy neighbourhood of Model Town, just two days before he was due to return to the United States after five years in the deeply conservative nuclear-armed Muslim country of 167 million.

“One thing has been confirmed - that he is American and that he was kidnapped for this reason,” Atif Hayat, a senior police criminal investigation official said in Lahore.

There had still been no claim of responsibility, he said, and officers were questioning his guards and colleagues, and combing phone records, as part of the search. “So far we have no clue, nor has anyone contacted us,” he said.

Although kidnappings of Westerners are relatively rare in Pakistan, abductions in the country involve both Al-Qaeda-linked militants and criminals looking for pay-offs.

Lahore is the capital of the eastern province of Punjab and considered one of Pakistan’s more liberal cities. Other Westerners abducted in recent years have been snatched in far more volatile parts of the country.