Pakistan has charged Osama bin Laden's three widows with illegal entry, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said today, without saying when it had done so or when a trial will begin.

Pakistan took the Al-Qaeda terror chief's wives -- two Saudis and a Yemeni -- and around 10 of their children into custody after US Navy SEALs killed him at his house in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad on May 2, 2011.

"The case has been registered only against the adults," Malik told reporters in the capital Islamabad. "They can have a lawyer and they have full liberty to go to court and defend themselves," he added.

Malik said bin Laden's children were being kept in a five-bedroom house "with proper facilities as if they were in their own home" but that they were free to return to their native countries if their mothers agreed.

A commission probing how bin Laden lived undetected for years in Pakistan investigated his widows and daughters and took statements from them last year.

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