One of Osama bin Laden’s sons has asked for political asylum in Spain, the Spanish interior ministry said on Tuesday, months after he was refused permission to live in England with his British wife.
Omar bin Laden, a self-described pacifist, made the request immediately after arriving at Madrid’s Barajas airport on Monday on a flight from Cairo, where he currently lives, that had been en route to Casablanca in Morocco.
“He has asked for asylum. The law has been applied. He is being held in Barajas and the asylum commission, which has the legal capacity to decide if he should receive asylum or not, is analyzing the request,” Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez told a press conference.
PHOTO: AP
Rubalcaba did not say on what grounds the 28-year-old, who was travelling on a passport from Saudi Arabia, was seeking asylum from the commission which is answerable to the minister.
Under Spanish asylum rules, the ministry has 72 hours to make a decision, and the petitioner has a right of appeal.
Omar flew to Madrid with his wife Zaina Alsabah bin Laden, 52, formerly known as Jane Felix-Browne, who he married last year, a source close to Omar bin Laden said.
Authorities in Britain turned down a request in April from Omar for a settlement visa.
At the time he said he wanted to live in England with Zaina at her home in northwestern England.
The British embassy in Cairo said it had based its decision on fears that his presence in the country would cause “considerable public concern.”
It is thought the authorities were referring to comments made by Omar that he could not be certain that his father was responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the US that killed more than 3,000 people.
Asked during an interview with CNN in January if he knew his father was behind the attacks, Omar replied: “Yeah, maybe.”
Omar also declined to directly condemn his father during the interview but called on him to give up violence.
“I try and say to my father: ‘Try to find another way to help or find your goal. This bomb, this weapons, it’s not good to use it for anybody,’” he said.
He said he had not spoken to his father since 2000, when he walked away from an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan with Osama’s blessings, and does not know where the al-Qaeda leader is.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS