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France's interior minister said Tuesday he has taken additional steps against any effort by one of the sons of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to return to France. Omar bin Laden had been living in France's Normandy region but left the country in October 2023 after French authorities withdrew his residency papers and ordered him out, the Interior Ministry said. At the time, authorities also barred him from returning to France for two years, the ministry added. In a post Tuesday on the social media platform X, French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said he imposed an additional ban to ensure that Omar bin Laden will not be able to return to France for any reason whatsoever. French daily Le Parisien reported that Omar bin Laden now lives in Qatar. It said he had previously been living since 2016 in the Orne region of Normandy with his British wife and had been working as an artist. The newspaper said that last week he lost a legal battle to overturn the ban on him returning to ...
A group of Pakistani dissidents have expressed dismay over Prime Minister Imran Khan calling slain al-Qaeda chief and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden a "martyr," saying this could be out of a "sinister reason" of putting the West, especially the US on notice. Under the banner of South Asians Against Terrorism & For Human Rights (SAATH) Forum, the group that includes Pakistan's former envoy to the US Hussain Haqqani, condemned Khan for making such a statement in Parliament. What makes this doubly disgusting is that Imran Khan made this claim on the floor of Pakistan's National Assembly. For, another Prime Minister of Pakistan, Yusaf Raza Gillani, had in selfsame, National Assembly on May 9, 2011, denounced bin Laden as a terrorist and had welcomed his elimination, it said in a statement. Speaking in Parliament during the budget session on June 25, Khan called bin Laden a "shaheed" (martyr) and said that Islamabad faced "embarrassment" by taking part in America's war on ...