A Pakistan Airlines ad shows a plane flying over the Eiffel Tower

The image has been viewed more than 21 million times on X since it was published last week and has quickly gone viral.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has ordered an investigation into the problem, while Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar has also criticized the ad, Pakistan’s Geo News reported.

The 9/11 attacks saw hijackers crash passenger jets 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 mastermind of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, was arrested in Pakistan in 2003.

Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaeda extremist network that planned attacks, was killed by US forces in Pakistan in 2011.

Pakistani journalist Omar Quraishi said the PIA ad left him “literally speechless”.

“Why is the airline management not investigating this?

“Why don’t they know about the tragedy of 9/11 – who used planes to attack buildings? Why don’t they think that this will be perceived in the same way,” he wrote in X.

The airline did not comment on the incident.

The 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 jet on the twin towers.

In 2017, the airline was mocked after staff sacrificed a goat to ward off bad luck following one of the country’s worst air disasters.

And in 2019, PIA caused an uproar when it told flight attendants to slim down or be grounded. Staff were told they had six months to lose “excess weight”.