When anchor Fareeha Idrees asked Abbasi whether he thinks Osama bin Laden was a martyr, he said that let the Parliament debate the matter. "We should decide once and for all if Osama was a martyr or not. If this is an issue, there needs to be a debate on it," he said.
When the anchor said to him that as a former prime minister his opinion on the issue matters, he proceeded to say that even a former PM is a smaller authority than the parliament.
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Earlier, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi had also refused to call Osama bin Ladin a terrorist during interview with an international media outlet. When asked about Prime Minister Imran Khan's controversial statement declaring Osama bin Laden a 'shaheed', the FM first said that the statement was taken out of context and a section of media 'played it up'. When the interviewer asked him if he disagreed with the PM and whether or not he considered bin Laden a martyr, he refused to answer the question, saying: "I will let that pass."
The FM's statement led to widespread criticism on social media with Information Minister Fawad Chaudhry also stating that killers of innocent people cannot be termed a martyr.