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Omar would later win a controversial $10.5 million settlement from the Canadian government for not protecting his Charter rights while he was held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison.
But while her little brother could claim he was just a brainwashed child soldier at the time, big sister Zaynab’s well-documented history of extremist beliefs can’t rely on the same excuse.
Born in Ottawa in 1979, her Egyptian father and Palestinian mother moved the family to Afghanistan in 1985 where her dad began working closely with bin Laden.
He arranged Zaynab’s first marriage when she was 15 to a man implicated in an al Qaida bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan. When that marriage ended after six months, she next wed a Yemeni man in Kabul.
Bin Laden was one of the honoured guests.
In a 2004 CBC documentary, Zaynab expressed support for the 9/11 attacks with chilling dispassion.
“Sometimes innocent people pay the price,” she said. “You don’t want to feel happy, but you just sort of think, ‘Well, they deserve it, they’ve been doing it for such a long time. Why shouldn’t they feel it once in a while?’”
When she returned to Canada in 2005, she was investigated by the RCMP for allegedly aiding al-Qaida after a search of her luggage uncovered the terror group’s training manual and other propaganda. No charges were ultimately filed.
Zaynab was still considered enough of a concern that after Khadr was returned to Canada in 2012 and eventually paroled, authorities refused to allow him to meet his sister without supervision.