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QUETTA, Pakistan, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Pakistani protesters burned the U.S. flag and called for a strike in the home town of a Muslim militant due to be executed later on Thursday in the United States.

Pakistani Mir Aimal Kansi was scheduled to die by lethal injection in Virginia for the murders of two Central Intelligence Agency employees in 1993.

"Aimal is our hero!" about 150 members of Kansi's tribe chanted as they marched through the streets of the central city of Quetta, not far from the border with Afghanistan.

"Aimal is not a terrorist," tribal elder Ibrahim Kansi told demonstrators. "His action was a reaction to what was happening to Muslims in Chechnya and Palestine."

Tribal leaders called for a strike in Quetta on Friday if the execution went ahead.

Other activists protested in the central town of Multan and called for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.

"The death sentence on Aimal Kansi exposes American claims of being a champion of human rights," a speaker there said.

Only a reprieve from the U.S. Supreme Court or Virginia Governor Mark Warner -- considered unlikely -- can stop Kansi's execution at Virginia's Greensville Correctional Center.

His mother and the Pakistani government have asked Warner to show mercy.

Kansi was allowed to speak by telephone with his family in Pakistan on Thursday. "He talked for around 20 minutes with his mother, with me, his sisters, nieces and nephews," Kansi's brother Naseebullah Khan told Reuters.

ASKED HIMS MOTHER TO HAVE COURAGE

"He asked his mother to have courage," Khan said. "He told her to give his wishes to the motherland and to the people of Pakistan and asked them to pray for him."

Khan said Aimal was in "high spirits" and asked everyone to show courage. "Today I realised that he is a very courageous man," Khan said. "He was calm in his talk."

The U.S. State Department warned Americans last week the execution could trigger retaliatory attacks on U.S. interests overseas. Demonstrators in Pakistan earlier this week threatened a strong response.

But Khan told Reuters: "No foreigner should be hurt in retaliation for his death." He said if appeals for clemency failed, the family wanted to bring Kansi's body back for a burial in the ancestral graveyard in Quetta.

Kansi was convicted of killing of Lansing Bennett, 66, a physician and intelligence analyst, and Frank Darling, 28, an undercover agent, outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Kansi flew to Pakistan the day after the killings and was not found for four years.

U.S. authorities say he spent most of that time in Afghanistan, hiding in and around Kandahar, which was later to emerge as a stronghold of the militant Taliban movement linked with Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network.

Kansi's home province of Baluchistan borders Afghanistan and is a stronghold of hardline Islamic groups that made big gains in national elections last month by exploiting anger at the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.

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