Latest news with #HasinaKhan
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Revealed: Widow of 7/7 suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan has reinvented herself under a different name to build a brand new life
The widow of 7/7 suicide bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan has reinvented herself under a different name to build a brand new life, MailOnline can reveal. Hasina Khan, now 47, cut all ties to her former existence after her then husband masterminded the worst terror attack ever to hit Britain. Twenty years on from the London blasts that killed 52 and injured 700, Hasina - who now goes by a new first name - lives in a smart four-bedroom detached house in West Yorkshire. It is less than five miles from where cold-blooded Khan plotted the carnage that claimed 52 lives and left more than 700 injured on July 7, 2005. MailOnline understands that Mrs Khan - who said she had been completely unaware of her first husband's descent into extremism or his secret trips to an al-Qaeda training camp - has transformed her life, running holistic wellness retreats for women from the comfort of her home. She also quietly remarried after falling in love with a 50-year-old plumber, with whom she is believed to have three children. Her daughter with Khan, born just a year before the terror attacks, is now aged 21. Locals in the quiet West Yorkshire town where Mrs Khan now lives told how she has rebuilt her life from the ashes of Britain's darkest day. One said: 'Hasina has completely moved on with her life. She found love and they seem like a very normal, happy couple. You'd never imagine what she's been through. "They keep themselves to themselves. She's often seen out and about with the kids, and her husband is always busy working. They're just like any other family around here - polite, private, and trying to live a peaceful life. 'She's always very friendly when you see her. "It's 20 years on now and life has changed for the better. But even now, she must still feel traumatised by what her former husband did. I'm sure the shock of that day will never fully fade." Mrs Khan moved from Sheffield to West Yorkshire in around 2021 after securing a detached house for £120,000 in 2017. She and her husband carried out an extensive rebuild, virtually demolishing the original property before transforming it into a sleek, modern four-bedroom home complete with solar panels and a network of discreetly-positioned CCTV cameras. The family now live behind electric gates, with an Audi parked on the drive. Locals told how Mrs Khan is now a personal trainer offering holistic therapies. In one social media post, the fitness enthusiast revealed how exercise became her salvation during dark times: 'Exercise has always been a passion of mine, as far as I can remember 'It has always been a way to destress and feel happier. "It was an escape but it also made me stronger and healthier.' Mrs Khan also devotes her time to an Islamic humanitarian charity, raising funds and awareness for displaced Palestinians in Gaza. When approached by MailOnline at her home ahead of the 20th anniversary of the London bombings, Mrs Patel initially denied being the widow of Khan, saying we had the wrong address. She later rowed back on this, explaining: 'Obviously we have to safeguard ourselves.' She added: 'I've no comment to make. I'm not saying nothing.' Her second husband said that speaking about 7/7 would potentially be 'traumatising' for her. She met 7/7 bomber Khan at Leeds Metropolitan University and they married in 2001, years before Khan transformed from an unassuming teaching assistant into Britain's most reviled mass murderer. In a 2007 TV interview, she spoke of his disbelief and horror at what her husband had done, saying: 'If somebody did that to me or my daughter I could never forgive them. How can you be so calculated and not have any emotions?' She also revealed learning that she had miscarried their child 40 minutes after Khan had blown himself up. She tried to contact him, not realising he was dead. She said: 'I went back to my own house and put the TV on and saw that the bombings had happened. It was just all over the news. 'I just couldn't believe it. You normally hear of things like this in America, but you know, London, and I was more worried." Mrs Khan added that she was ashamed of her murderer husband but prayed for his forgiveness. She said: ''I just hope and I pray for him because I feel there was a good person in there but feel he was probably misled and brainwashed by the wrong people. 'Looking back I can't imagine how I got through those few months. It was like trying to come to terms with the fact that he has committed a terrorist attack. 'I couldn't believe it, I had lost my child and been moved out of my house. Everything at once. 'It was unbelievable. Looking back I can't believe how I got through it, I tried to block it out, tried not to think about it." It would later emerge that her husband had recorded a video for their baby daughter then six months old, now approaching her 21st birthday. In it he urged their daughter to be strong and to 'learn to fight', telling her: "Fighting is good". In the footage, Khan kissed his daughter on the head as he told her that he was sad he would miss her growing up. 'Sweetheart, not long to go now. And I'm going to really, really miss you a lot. I'm thinking about it already. Look, I absolutely love you to bits and you have been the happiest thing in my life. You and your mum, absolutely brilliant. 'I don't know what else to say. I just wish I could have been part of your life, especially these growing up - these next months, they're really special with you learning to walk and things. I just so much wanted to be with you but I have to do this thing for our future and it will be for the best, inshallah [God willing], in the long run. That's the most important thing.' The atrocity remains the deadliest terror attack on British soil. At 4am on July 7, 2005, Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Germaine Lindsay, 19 - left Leeds in a hired Nissan Micra, meeting a fourth accomplice in Luton before heading to London. Khan detonated his device on a Circle Line train at Edgware Road. Tanweer struck between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, while Lindsay carried out the deadliest blast on the Piccadilly Line between King's Cross and Russell Square. An hour later, Hasib Hussain, 18, set off the fourth bomb on a bus at Tavistock Square.
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Pakistan's polio war faces Trump's WHO snub, surging militancy
Mohamed Abid dreams of becoming a pilot to fly high in the sky, but the small boy finds his wings clipped. The 12-year-old polio victim from the north-western Pakistani town of Mardan can barely even walk without a special pair of shoes customized for kids with paralysed limbs. 'I like playing with other kids, but can't run like them,' said the child whose family migrated from Afghanistan to live in Pakistan - like millions of others in 1970s - to flee the advancing Russian army. The family has since been struggling, living in refugee camps and toiling to meet ends before settling down in the shanty town with narrow alleys and dirt roads. 'Life has never been easy and with a paralysed kid it becomes even harder,' said Hasina Khan, Abid's mother who looks after four kids after the death of her husband a few years ago. The young mother, in her 40s, blames herself for the plight of her son. It was she who refused to get her son vaccinated after an argument with health workers. 'I regret that,' says the grieving mother, who has been making sure her other kids get vaccinated every time a campaign is run by the health department. Pakistan, a South Asian nuclear power with a population of around 240 million, is, along with neighbouring Afghanistan, one of the last polio hotspots in the world, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The country runs periodic immunization drives funded by the WHO and the US' Gates Foundation to vaccinate kids under the age of 5 to save them from the virus that cripples its victims for life. But despite several years of the campaign - and once being on the verge of eradicating the virus - polio has surged to an alarming level last year when at least 74 new cases were reported. That compares with only six cases in 2023, a year when hopes of complete eradication emerged. Pakistani officials listed the lack of access to areas hit by the Islamist militancy and the cross border movement of people with Afghanistan as some of the major factors behind the surge. 'We plan to launch coordinated campaigns with the Taliban government in Afghanistan,' said Zia ur Rehman, a spokesman for the polio eradication team. Misconceptions among the communities and illiteracy on both sides of the border further complicate the situation, resulting in parents refusing vaccination, Rehman added. In the town of Mardan, health worker Najia Wajid feels and faces those misconceptions every time she takes part in a door-to-door vaccination drive. 'People don't see any immediate return for waiting in queues at the health centres and lining up their kids when vaccine workers visit their place,' said Wajid. Their mindset is driven by the violent opposition by Taliban militants and some clerics to the vaccination, calling it the West's conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. In a WhatsApp message to dpa, the Pakistani Taliban said they don't target health care and the polio campaigns, but the reality is starkly the opposite. Nearly 150 health workers and police officers guarding them have been killed during vaccination drives since 2012. 'That's where the problem lies. When people see militants attacking the campaign and clerics opposing it, they start doubting it,' another health worker Jahangir Syed said in Mardan. Apart from violence by the Pakistani Taliban who have killed nearly 80,000 of their countrymen in decades of violence, the South Asian nation's polio war is up against a new challenge. US President Donald Trump's recent announcement to withdraw funding to the WHO is likely to impact health-care projects all across the global south including in Pakistan. Though Pakistani officials played down an anticipated impact, a WHO spokesman in Geneva said any reduction in commitment from any partner endangers the goal of achieving a polio-free world. 'The world must remain steadfast and united in the common cause... of a world and future free from polio,' Oliver Rosenbauer said without naming or blaming Trump. Whatever motivates Trump's move or the Taliban's reasons for targeting the drive, mothers like Hasina would desperately like the world to win the war against the crippling virus. 'I wish it doesn't happen to anyone's child,' said the mother, looking at her child as he seeks her help to put on his prescription shoes.
