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Pakistani national Mir Aimal Kansi is to be executed by lethal injection Thursday for the 1993 murder of two CIA officers, amid US authorities' fears of reprisals.

The impending execution has put Washington on guard against possible revenge attacks by Islamist groups, with the State Department issuing a warning November 6.

Tribal chiefs and religious authorities in Pakistan have protested to Islamabad and Washington to intervene in the execution, calling for a pardon for Kansi, or for his sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.

Kansi, 38, is scheduled for execution in Virginia, where he was convicted of the double murder outside the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters, in an attack that injured three other people.

He belongs to a powerful tribe of Pakistan's southwestern tribal-dominated desert province of Baluchistan, and his family lives in the Baluch capital Quetta, 680 kilometres (423 miles) from the capital Islamabad.

Kansi had quietly returned to Pakistan after the murder, via Iran, but was finally captured in a hotel in Dera Ghazi Khan, 80 kilometers (50 miles) west of Multan, in central Pakistan.

He was picked up by US Federal Bureau of Intelligence agents in 1997, some four years after the murders, and was then extradited to the United States for trial.

"Kansi has been delivered abroad by Afghan individuals to the custody of United States authorities," the CIA and FBI said in a brief statement at the time.

Kansi had carried out the slayings on January 25, 1993.

He already knew whom he was targeting and had waited outside the main gate of CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia for his two victims to appear.

Their vehicle left CIA headquarters, and at the first red stop light Kansi went up to them with an AK-47 assault rifle, killing both men and wounding three other people.

The two people who died were CIA intelligence analyst Lansing Bennet and Frank Darling, assigned to tasks involving covert operations, the Washington Post reported at the time.

Kansi left the United States the next day on a scheduled flight to Karachi.

He became the most wanted man on the FBI list, with a two million-dollar price tag on his head.

Several versions of Kansi's motives for the slayings did the rounds.

It was unclear whom Kansi had been working for: whether he was an agent employed by Tehran, or maybe even a former CIA agent let down by his patrons, and on whom he sought revenge.

Another question also went unanswered: how Kansi managed to leave the United States on an out-of-date Pakistani passport that expired in March 1992 and had not been renewed.

Investigators determined that he arrived in the United States in March 1991 with a business visa on his Pakistani passport, and had found work at a transport company owned by the son of a former assistant to late CIA director Richard Helms.

On November 10, 1997, six months after his arrest, Kansi was sentenced to death by a jury in Fairfax, Virginia.

Tribal head Arbab Zahir Kansi said he and Kansi's 61-year-old mother had made a written appeal to the US Justice Department to either commute his sentence or pardon him, but had so far received no response.

More than 200 Islamic activists demonstrated in Multan this week, calling for Kansi's extradition to be judged by Pakistan.

Pakistani authorities, also fearful of a violent backlash against US interests if the execution goes ahead, have tightened security in Baluchistan as well as the politically volatile southern port city of Karachi.

Anti-US Islamic militants have exploded two deadly car bombs this year in attacks on French and US interests in Karachi. US reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by Islamic militants in Karachi early in the year. 

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