Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan has raked up yet another controversy by calling a slain terrorist and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden a “shaheed” (martyr) while addressing the National Assembly.
A viral video clip showed how the PTI leader lashed out at the United States for how Laden had been killed in Abbottabad.
“We helped the Americans in ‘war on terror’ but the embarrassment we had to face for their allegations of Pakistan being a safe haven for terrorists is very terrible. Our ally is secretly coming into our country and killing a terrorist and we don’t even have an idea,” he said.
Osama bin Laden was the head of the Al Qaeda and the brains behind the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States in 2001.
Osama bin Laden was killed in a military operation by US Navy Seals in 2011 at the garrison town Abbottabad. He was accused of engineering a number of terror attacks worldwide, particularly targeting the American installations including the 9/11 incident of 2001 when close to 3,000 people lost their lives when five planes were hijacked to target American cities.
Khan’s speech came as Pakistan’s foreign office rejected a US state department report accusing Pakistan of continuing to be a safe haven for regionally focused terrorist groups.
He has previously been criticised as sympathetic towards the Taliban, and branded “Taliban Khan” by opponents.
Following his controversial Bin Laden remark, Afrasiab Khatak, a nationalist former senator and former head of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), said in a tweet that the prime minister had been brought to power to implement “Project Taliban”.
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