“We are not yet certain of the origin of the ads,” John Burgess, counselor for public affairs at the US Embassy in Riyadh, told Arab News. “It appears that a subcontractor of a subcontractor hired a headhunting firm in India to locate employees. The statements which were made in the ad are explicitly prohibited in US law.”

Burgess said the story had also appeared in the Pakistani English daily The Dawn. The US embassy in Islamabad has also stressed that the ad does not represent US policy.

New Delhi’s Hindustan Times of March 27 called for applications from “non-Muslims only” as lift operators, storekeepers, clerks, typists, security guards and drivers.

The advertisement insists that besides being non-Muslims, the applicants should speak English and be under 35. The ad was issued by the Kuwaiti company Marafi, which has a maintenance contract with the US Army.

“The Americans are strict that we should only process applications sent in by non-Muslims,” Rehman Enterprises head Abdul Rehman was quoted as saying. “The response has been very bad. We are getting very few calls,” Rehman was quoted as saying.

Burgess forwarded to Arab News a letter written by Gordon K.Duguid, press attache at the US Embassy in New Delhi to the editor of the Hindustan Times.

It quotes Executive Order 11246, according to which contractors for the US government cannot “discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”

The law, Gordon wrote, states categorically that any contractor guilty of discrimination is liable to have his contract “canceled, terminated or suspended in whole or in part and the contractor may be declared ineligible for further government contracts.”

Commenting editorially, the Statesman newspaper argued “that a young, unemployed, semi-skilled Indian Muslim reading this advertisement can only conclude that his neighborhood table-thumping mullah must be right, and that America is a proper target for Islamic anger.”