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The comments were made 13 years ago, but for many Canadians they continue to define Zaynab Khadr, and by extension much of her ill-famed family.

In interviews with the National Post and others, the Ottawa-born daughter of an alleged al Qaeda insider spoke with jarring ambivalence about the 9/11 attacks.

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The person behind the 2001 terrorist attacks wanted to hit the American government “where it will hurt it, not the people,” she told the CBC. “But sometimes innocent people pay the price. You don’t want to feel happy, but you just sort of think, well, they deserve it, they’ve been doing it for such a long time. Why shouldn’t they feel it once in a while?”

Zaynab has also denied that her family were terrorists, and suggested they traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s only to do charitable work.

But those incendiary 2004 remarks — and other facets of her extraordinary life — are again coming to the fore, as brother Omar Khadr asks a court to loosen his bail, in part so he can have unencumbered communications with his sister and mother.