The official, an employee at the U.S. Consulate in Lahore, told the court that he shot the two men Thursday afternoon as they tried to rob him while he waited at a busy intersection in his car. A second consular vehicle that he summoned for help struck and killed a motorcyclist as it sped to the scene, police said.
A judge ordered the official held in custody for six days for further questioning.
The incident has generated enormous media coverage in Pakistan and threatened to strain U.S. relations with the fervently anti-American country, a key ally and recipient of U.S. assistance. The deaths are being widely depicted as an illustration of Americans' disregard for ordinary Pakistanis and as a test case of the unpopular central government's capacity to stand up to its U.S. sponsors.
Pakistani officials insisted Friday that the American, whom Pakistani authorities identified as Raymond Davis, would receive no special treatment. Rana Sanaullah, the law minister for Punjab province, of which Lahore is the capital, told reporters that Davis also faces a charge of illegal weapons possession and that "VIP protocol" would not be followed in the case.
"No one will be allowed to breach the law in Pakistan," Interior Minister Rehman Malik told legislators. "The law will take its due course."
U.S. officials on Thursday would not confirm the name of the suspect.
At a news conference in Lahore, Sanaullah said Davis told authorities he had withdrawn money from a bank shortly before the alleged holdup. Police said Thursday that they recovered two pistols from the dead men, but Sanaullah said he had doubts that Davis shot in self-defense.
A police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case, told The Washington Post on Friday that an autopsy showed both victims had been shot multiple times, including in the back.
Many Pakistani reports have questioned why the U.S. consular employee, who, according to some local press accounts, told Pakistani authorities he was a "technical adviser" at the consulate, was armed.
Many Western diplomats travel with security details in Pakistan, where robberies are fairly common and Islamist militants stage regular bombings and kidnappings. But the use of convoys by embassies and the question of whether diplomats should be permitted to carry weapons have been sources of controversy in recent years.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad has said only that the person involved in the shootout was an American employee at the consulate in Lahore. Officials have declined to confirm the employee's name or say what position he holds, why he was carrying a gun and whether they believe he has diplomatic immunity.
The CIA declined to comment Thursday on whether the suspect worked for the agency.
Sanaullah also said that said the U.S. Consulate in Lahore had agreed to a police request to turn the driver of the second vehicle over to police.
Demonstrators burned American flags at small anti-U.S. protests in several Pakistani cities Friday. Relatives of Fahim Hussain, one of the men Davis allegedly shot, stopped traffic in their Lahore neighborhood and placed Hussain's body on the street, where they gathered to demand justice.
"We will not allow the government to sell the blood of our son," said the victim's father, Shamsad Hussain, 55. "The killer should be hanged."