After more than a decade on the run with the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden's widows and daughters have been fined £70 each and sentenced to a short spell in prison.
The three women and two adult daughters are set to leave Pakistan after being held since US navy Seals killed the al-Qaida leader in a night raid on the family compound in the town of Abbottabad last May. The five women, who are being held in a villa in an upmarket neighbourhood of the capital, Islamabad, will be deported after they complete their sentences.
Despite their links to Bin Laden, the women were charged with little more than being in Pakistan without a visa. After the time since their formal arrest in March is taken into account, their sentence will be about two weeks.
Some analysts had predicted far lengthier sentences to prevent the women revealing any more details about how the US's most wanted man was able to live in Pakistan for so long, moving around between houses and even fathering four children, two born in public hospitals.
The Bin Laden affair has been acutely embarrassing for Pakistan's security services and has raised questions whether they were complicit in hiding the terror chief or just plain incompetent.
In theory, violating Pakistani immigration laws can carry sentences of up to five years. The family lawyer, Mohammad Amir Khali, said Yemen had already agreed to take back Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, at 30 the youngest of Bin Laden's wives and a Yemeni citizen. She was shot in the leg during the attack on the Bin Laden compound.
However, discussions are still taking place with Saudi Arabia over the fate of the other women, Khali said.
The women are being detained in a heavily guarded, three-storey house in a residential area of Islamabad. Few have access to the family, and legal proceedings took place at the house because of security concerns. The Pakistanis may have calculated that no more harm can come from freeing the women.
Details of their extraordinary story have already been widely leaked, with sections of Sada's police testimony appearing in the Pakistani press.
According to her version of events, Bin Laden's wives were forced to leave their husband immediately after the attacks of 11 September 2001.
Sada hid in the sprawling coastal city of Karachi, which is thought to host many wanted figures, including senior members of the Taliban. She said she returned to her husband's side just a year later, moving between various towns within the "settled areas" of Pakistan, rather than in the tribal belt which is scarcely controlled by the government.
The family eventually settled into the house in Abbottabad which, although large, was crowded with Bin Laden's wives, eight children and five grandchildren.
According to an independent investigation into the affair by a retired Pakistani brigadier who was given access to interrogation transcripts, Sada, the youngest wife, loathed Khairiah Saber, the oldest, who had managed to travel with her husband after being freed from a decade of detention in Iran.
Sada told Pakistani interrogators she believed the older woman had deliberately betrayed their husband to the US.
