Thursday, 13 May 2021: Saudi Arabia has released construction mogul, Bakr bin Laden, more than three years after his detention in a purge of the kingdom’s elite that upended his vast business empire.

The former chairman of Saudi Arabia’s biggest construction company, the Bin Laden Group, was reunited last week with his family in the Red Sea city of Jeddah after being freed from an undisclosed detention site, two people close to his family have confirmed.

It was unclear whether the release of Bakr, a tycoon in his 70s once seen as a major powerbroker, was provisional as his movements are still curtailed.

“He was released and told to stay home but people are allowed to visit him”, one of the sources said.

His family is “overjoyed”, the second source said, adding they hoped his release was not a temporary goodwill gesture by the government towards the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Bakr, is a half-brother of the late Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The Bin Laden family, branded as the Rockefellers of Saudi Arabia for their sprawling infrastructure projects, reaped enormous wealth for decades on the back of their proximity to the Al Saud royal family.

But their fortunes tanked following the ascent of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who has sought to remake the oil-reliant economy and dismantle top-down patronage networks that enriched a handful of elite families