Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on Thursday raked up yet another controversy as he referred slain terrorist and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden as a "shaheed" (martyr) while addressing the National Assembly.
Bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals in Pakistan's Abbottabad in May, 2011.
A clip of his speech, now viral, shows the PTI leader lashing out at the United States for insulting Pakistan despite supporting it in "War on Terror."
Khan said one of the incidents that have hugely embarrassment Pakistan was how Laden had been killed in Abbottabad. The Pak Prime Minister used the phrase "shaheed kar diya" (martyred) for Laden.
"I don't think there's a country which supported the war on terror and had to face embarrassment for it. Pakistan was also openly blamed for US' failure in Afghanistan," Khan said.
"We helped the Americans in 'war on terror but the embarrassment we had to face for their allegations of Pakistan being a safe haven for terrorists is very terrible. Our ally is secretly coming into our country and killing a terrorist and we don`t even have an idea," Khan said.
"For Pakistanis across the globe, it was an embarrassing moment when the Americans came and killed Osama bin Laden at Abbottabad...Martyred him. The whole world started abusing us after that. Our ally came inside our country and killed someone without informing us. And, 70,000 Pakistanis died because of US' war on terror," he said.
Khan's remarks drew criticism from the Opposition.
"Osama bin Laden was a terrorist and our PM called him a martyr. He was behind the massacre of thousands," Khawaja Asif of Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) said.
Laden was the head of the global terror group Al Qaeda and the brain behind the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States in 2001.
He was killed in a military operation by US Navy Seals in 2011 at the garrison town Abbottabad. He was accused of engineering a number of terror attacks worldwide, particularly targeting the American installations including the 9/11 incident of 2001 when close to 3,000 people lost their lives in attacks on twin World Trade Center towers in New York with hijacked planes.
