Sunday, July 15, 2007

A Peak Inside the Bin Laden Family

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Photo of Wafah Dufour as she appeared on GQ magazine courtesy of The Sydney Morning Herald
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: Terrorism may have made their name reviled in the West but, as Olga Craig reports, there is much more to the bin Laden family, as its latest addition is about to discover.

WHEN Jane Felix-Browne, a 51-year-old parish councillor, grandmother and housewife from Cheshire in England, became the besotted bride of Omar bin Laden recently, she could scarcely have been surprised at the amount of media interest her marriage attracted. Not so much her spouse, a 27-year-old Steptoe-style scrap dealer from Jeddah but rather her new, infamous father-in-law: Osama bin Laden.

In the past few days the new Mrs bin Laden's background has been trawled over: her five former husbands (all, like her new one, married in haste, and several divorced within weeks) and her penchant for plastic surgery, tattoos and greasy bikers. She would seem an unlikely daughter-in-law for the austere, Koran-thumping man whose name she now bears - wildly out of place in this secretive and extensive family. (Osama has 25 half-brothers and 29 half-sisters, all the product of his father Mohammed's 22 wives. The siblings have produced more than 300 children, with Osama himself fathering 20 by his five wives.) A family that dares not speak its name (more)

Mark Alexander