Islamabad: A brother-in-law of slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden has filed a petition in a Pakistani court challenging the registration of a criminal case against his sister and her children for illegally entering and living in the country.
Zakarya Ahmed Abdalfattah, the younger brother of bin Laden’s youngest widow Amal, named the federal government, ISI and the Interior and Defence Secretaries as respondents in his petition filed in the Islamabad High Court yesterday.
He expressed reservations over the trial of his sister by Civil Judge Shahrukh Arjumand. The High Court’s office raised some minor objections about the maintainability of the petition but fixed it for hearing by Chief Justice Iqbal Hameedur Rehman.
The court of the civil judge recently remanded bin Laden’s three widows and children to judicial custody as it began their trial on charges of illegally entering and living in Pakistan.
The women and children, who were earlier in the custody of intelligence agencies, were recently moved to a house in Islamabad which has been declared a sub-jail. Abdalfattah’s petition said Pakistani authorities could not register a criminal case against his sister and her five minor children – Safiah, Asia, Ibraheem, Zainab and Hussain – because they were living in the country like millions of Afghans who had migrated during the Afghan war.
Abdalfattah challenged the registration of a criminal case under Sections 13 and 14 of the Foreigners Act and Sections 212 and 419 of Pakistan Penal Code (PPC). The provisions of the Foreigners Act could not apply to his sister and her children because the matter of a foreign national entering and living in Pakistan related to political and foreign affairs, he claimed.
Section 212 of the PPC, he argued, did not apply in the case because Amal was living with her husband and could not be charged with harbouring a criminal because she had not given refuge to a third person in her house.
Section 419 of the PPC relating to the assumption of a false identity could not be applied against Amal as she had not introduced herself with a fake identity, Abdalfattah claimed.
The al-Qaeda chief was killed by US special forces during a covert raid in the garrison town of Abbottabad in May last year. The incident deeply embarrassed Pakistan’s powerful security establishment as bin Laden’s compound was located a stone’s throw from the elite Pakistan Military Academy. (PTI)