ISLAMABAD – Osama bin Laden’s family, detained in Pakistan, will only be repatriated once a government-appointed commission investigating the al-Qaeda leader’s killing allows them to leave, the panel said, a move that could set it on a collision course with the army.
Sixteen people, including bin Laden’s three wives and several children, were detained by Pakistani security forces after US special forces killed bin Laden in the northwestern garrison town of Abbottabad on May 2nd.
Pakistan’s foreign office said in May that bin Laden’s wives, one from Yemen and two from Saudi Arabia, would be repatriated.
However, the commission blocked the ministry of interior and the powerful spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) from allowing the family to leave Pakistan, it said in a statement issued late on Tuesday after its first meeting.
“The family can provide vital information about the presence of bin Laden in Abbottabad or elsewhere which could help the commission and that’s why it has asked the government not to repatriate them to their countries,” said Asad Munir, a retired ISI officer.
Bin Laden’s youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah, told Pakistani investigators in May that bin Laden and his family lived for five years in the compound in Abbottabad where he was killed.
The government set up the commission, headed by a senior judge, last month amid mounting public fury over the US raid that killed bin Laden which many Pakistanis see as a breach of sovereignty.
Its mandate is to look into how bin Laden could have lived in Pakistan for so long and how the United States was able to conduct the raid without the military’s knowledge. The decision to block the repatriation of the family could set it on a collision course with the country’s security establishment if the commission says the military was complicit in hiding bin Laden, analysts said.
But the commission, which also includes a retired army general and a former Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, cannot accomplish much without co-operation from the army and its intelligence services, analysts say. Pakistan has a history of probes that never yield results because of army interference. “There could be tension (between the army and the commission) if the commission deduced certain things which the army believed were incorrectly deduced,” former interior secretary and security analyst Tasneem Noorani said.
The commission was established after lawmakers, especially in the opposition, demanded a civilian, not military, probe into the killing of bin Laden, which deeply embarrassed Pakistan. – (Reuters)