Osama bin Laden widows: Will they reveal more about life in Pakistan?

Osama bin Laden widows: During her interrogation, the Yemeni widow raised questions about how bin Laden was able to remain undetected in Pakistan. A Pakistan court ruled Monday that Bin Laden's three widows and their children will be deported to their home countries.

|
REUTERS/Faisal Mahmood
Pakistani policemen stand guard outside the house where bin Laden's widows and children are believed to be detained in Islamabad, Pakistan, April 2, 2012..

 A Pakistani court on Monday convicted Osama bin Laden's three widows and two of his daughters of illegally entering and living in the country and sentenced them to 45 days in prison, with credit for time served, their lawyer said.

The five women have been in detention since last May when US commandos killed the Al Qaeda chief at the walled three-story compound in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad where he had been living with his family for six years.

Pakistani authorities formally arrested the women on March 3, so they will serve another two weeks in prison and then will be deported to their home countries along with the family's younger children, said their lawyer, Mohammed Amir Khalil.

IN PICTURES:Osama bin Laden's terror legacy

The case treads on a number of sensitive issues for Pakistan. The army faced rare domestic criticism following the US raid that killed the al-Qaida chief because they were powerless to stop it. Citizens also said bin Laden's presence in the country for so long either pointed to the military's incompetence or complicity.

Two of the widows are Saudi and one is Yemeni, Khalil said. Khalil said Yemen has consented to the return, but he is still in discussions with Saudi officials. Saudi Arabia stripped bin Laden of his citizenship in 1994 because of his verbal attacks against the Saudi royal family.

The five women were also ordered to pay a fine of about $110 each, which has already been done, said Khalil. The lawyer does not plan to appeal the court's ruling.

Islamabad was outraged by the US  raid that killed bin Laden because it was not told about it beforehand. Pakistani officials have said they had no idea the Al Qaeda chief was in Abbottabad, something many in Washington found hard to believe because his compound was located close to Pakistan's equivalent of West Point.

The US has not found any evidence indicating senior Pakistani officials knew of bin Laden's whereabouts.

But details uncovered recently from the interrogation of his 30-year-old Yemeni wife, Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, raised fresh questions about how bin Laden was able to remain undetected for so long in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, despite being the subject of a massive international manhunt.

After leaving Afghanistan, bin Laden lived in five safe houses over the course of nine years while on the run in Pakistan and fathered four children — two of them born in government hospitals, according to al-Sada's interrogation report, which was obtained by The Associated Press.

Al-Sada's account says she flew to Pakistan in 2000 and traveled to Afghanistan where she married bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

After that, the family "scattered" and she traveled to Karachi in Pakistan. She later met up with bin Laden in Peshawar and then moved to the Swat Valley, where they lived in two houses. They moved one more time before settling in Abbottabad in 2005.

The compound in Abbottabad was a crowded place, with 28 residents — including the 54-year-old bin Laden, his three wives, eight of his children and five of his grandchildren, according to Brig. Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani army officer who spent months researching the bin Laden raid and said he was given access to interrogation transcripts.

The bin Laden children ranged in age from his son Khaled, who was in his 20s and was killed in the raid, to a 3-year-old born during their time in Abbottabad, said Qadir. Bin Laden's courier, the courier's brother and their wives and children also lived in the compound.

There was tension between bin Laden's youngest wife, al-Sada, and his oldest, Khairiah Saber, who arrived in Abbottabad in early 2011 after being held in Iran for about a decade, the brigadier said. Some in the family were convinced Saber intended to betray the al-Qaida leader.

There is no evidence Khairiah Saber had any role in bin Laden's end. U.S. officials have said his courier inadvertently led the CIA to the Abbottabad villa after they overheard him in a monitored phone call.

IN PICTURES: Bin Laden's compound in Pakistan

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Osama bin Laden widows: Will they reveal more about life in Pakistan?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2012/0402/Osama-bin-Laden-widows-Will-they-reveal-more-about-life-in-Pakistan
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe