Dubai: Saudi Arabia has announced that it has revoked the citizenship of Hamza bin Laden, the son of late Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who has become an increasingly prominent figure in the terror network.
There was no immediate explanation why the royal decree stripping Hamza’s citizenship, signed in November, was only becoming public now. However, the announcement came after the US government Thursday offered a USD one million reward for information leading to his capture as part of its ‘Rewards for Justice’ programme.
The kingdom had similarly stripped Osama bin Laden’s citizenship in 1994 while living in exile in Sudan when Hamza was just a child. Where he is now remains in question.
“This is an example of history rhyming,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Foundation for Defence of Democracies who studies Al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.
“He’s (Hamza) basically born right after Al-Qaida was founded, so his life is totally consumed in the establishment, the formation of Al-Qaida and the launching of its war against the West and America,” stated Joscelyn.
Saudi Arabia revoked Hamza’s citizenship in November, according to a circular by the Interior Ministry quietly published Friday by the country’s official gazette. State-run media in the kingdom did not report on the decision.
Hamza, believed to be born in 1989, began appearing in militant videos and recordings in 2015 as an Al-Qaida spokesman.
“If you think that your (meaning the US) sinful crime that you committed in Abbottabad (US forces kill Osama) has passed without punishment, then you thought wrong,” he said in his first audio recording.
A United Nations report published last year noted that Hamza bin Laden ‘continued to emerge as a leadership figure in al-Qaida’. It suggested both he and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took over Al-Qaida after Osama’s death, ‘are reported to be in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas’.
Meanwhile in another development the UN Security Council has designated Hamza, under its sanctions list, subjecting him to a travel ban, assets freeze and an arms embargo as it described him as being seen as the ‘most probable successor’ of the group’s current leader Aiman al-Zawahiri.
AP
