Pakistani security officials and police screen a vehicle to hide the family of Osama bin Laden from media, in Islamabad, Pakistan on Thursday, April 26, 2012. A minivan carrying the three widows and children of Bin Laden has left the house where they have been staying in Islamabad and is en route to the airport, from where they will be deported to Saudi Arabia, officials and witness said. (AP Photo/B.K. Bangash)
RAWALPINDI—Osama bin Laden’s family were deported from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia early Friday, officials said, nearly a year after the Al-Qaeda leader was killed in a US raid.
The 9/11 mastermind’s three widows and their children were detained by Pakistani authorities after the Saudi was killed in a US Navy SEAL operation in the garrison town of Abbottabad, north of Islamabad, last May.
Washington and Islamabad’s relationship was badly damaged by the revelation that the world’s most wanted man was living a stone’s throw from Pakistan’s elite military academy.
The family’s departure will remove a physical reminder of that rupture and of the humiliation Pakistan felt at the raid, which the United States kept secret from its ally.
An interior ministry spokesman told AFP: “The plane has left for Saudi Arabia.”
A court sentenced the widows and two of bin Laden’s older daughters to 45 days’ detention on charges of illegal entry and residency in Pakistan and ordered their deportation.
Around midnight on Friday a minibus collected the terror kingpin’s family from the Islamabad house where they had served the sentence, which was completed 10 days ago.
The family were believed to number 12 — three widows, eight children and one grandchild — though an interior ministry spokesman said orders were passed for the deportation of 14 bin Laden relatives.
They were taken to Islamabad airport where they entered via a back entrance, sources said, before boarding a special flight to the Gulf kingdom which took off shortly before 2:00 am (2100 GMT Thursday).
The family were originally supposed to be deported after completing their sentence last week but the move dragged on — officially because legal formalities were not complete but amid suggestions the Saudis were reluctant to accept such a notorious group.
Then on Thursday, a Pakistani security official said, “some development happened late in the evening” allowing them to be expelled.
The discovery of bin Laden in Abbottabad dealt a huge blow to US-Pakistan relations and led to accusations of Pakistani complicity or incompetence.
After fleeing Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, bin Laden moved his family around Pakistan before settling in a three-storey house inside a walled compound in the garrison town of Abbottabad in 2005.
Bin Laden’s youngest and reportedly favourite wife Amal Abdulfattah, 30, told Pakistani interrogators that bin Laden had fathered four children while he hid out in Pakistan, according to a police report seen by AFP last month.
In February the Pakistani authorities, reluctant for the Abbottabad house to become a shrine to the dead terror leader, used bulldozers to raze the building to the ground.