The government of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was supported and funded by global terrorist Osama bin Laden at some point during the 1990s, said Pakistan’s former envoy to the United States Abida Hussain.
In an interview with Samaa on Saturday, the former ambassador said that the claims that OBL supported Nawaz are true. She, however, added that the story of Nawaz-OBL relationship is a “complicated one”.
Abida Hussain also talked about Pakistan’s nuclear programme, saying Nawaz Sharif was not aware of the developments regarding the project due to an unfriendly relationship with then president Ghulam Ishaq Khan.
She said that the nuclear programme was completed in 1992 and not 1983, adding that Pakistan was under a lot of pressure from US envoys and lawmakers to roll back the programme.
Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda chief who was killed by the US special forces in a midnight raid in Abbottabad in May 2011, was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks that left over 3,000 people dead. These attacks resulted in the US invasion of Afghanistan — a 20-year-long conflict that has claimed countless lives.
Bin Laden made headlines last year when PM Imran Khan called him a “shaheed” during a National Assembly session.
“Pakistanis were deeply embarrassed when Americans killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad. Shaheed kar diya [was martyred]. But what happened after that? The entire world hurled abuses at us. Our ally [the US] entered our country and killed someone without even telling us. It was a big humiliation,” he said before going on to describe the drone attacks as the second set of incidents that embarrassed the country.
