DUBAI, Feb 3: The killing in Madagascar of a Saudi brother-in-law of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was politically motivated and Madagascar “sold him” to intelligence services, his brother claimed in remarks published on Saturday.

The shooting of businessman Jamal Khalifa in Madagascar on Wednesday was “a premeditated crime for political reasons,” Malek Khalifa told the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat.

Malek said he initially doubted that his brother had been killed for political reasons, “but after I saw... the manoeuvres by officials (in Madagascar)... I became convinced that the government of Madagascar sold Jamal’s fate to international intelligence services.”

The gems trader was shot dead by an armed gang in Sakaraha, some 850 kilometres southeast of the capital Antananarivo, according to his brother and the authorities in Madagascar. Malek Khalifa said after the murder that his brother had no links with Osama, despite being related by marriage.

The Saudi government expressed regret at the murder and authorities carried out an autopsy on Khalifa’s body after its repatriation, Al-Hayat reported.

It said Khalifa’s name had been associated with “terror funding” for 12 years because he was an in-law of Osama and had been active in charities affiliated to the Muslim World League in Pakistan and the Philippines.

But the daily quoted the murdered man’s son, Abdulrahman, as saying that the numerous investigations he had been subjected to in several countries had “proven his total innocence of all concocted charges”.—AFP