SANAA, (Reuters) – The Yemeni father of Osama bin Laden’s youngest wife, wounded in a U.S. raid that killed the al Qaeda leader, said he initially rebuffed a matchmaker’s proposal that his daughter marry bin Laden, before blessing their union.
Ahmed Abdul-Fattah al-Saada said they were married in 1999, well before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and that all he knew about bin Laden’s politics then was that he had backed insurgents fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
Saada told Reuters it took several requests before he allowed his daughter Amal, one of 17 children, to travel to Afghanistan to marry bin Laden when she was 18 years old and he was in his early 40s.
“My daughter was Osama bin Laden’s wife, nothing more, and she had no relation to the al Qaeda organisation. I am confident of her innocence,” he told Reuters in an interview in his modest one-storey home in the Yemeni capital Sanaa, adding that he would like to see her returned home from Pakistan.
“We are not in favour of bin Laden’s actions and the al Qaeda organisation. We believe in coexistence between people.”
Yemen, bin Laden’s ancestral homeland, is home to an active regional arm of al Qaeda that claimed responsibility for a foiled 2009 attempt to blow up a U.S.-bound plane. It was also blamed for bombs found in cargo en route to the U.S. in 2010.
Militants bombed the U.S. Navy warship Cole in the port of Aden in 2000. Two years later an al Qaeda attack damaged the French supertanker Limburg in the Gulf of Aden.
Many of those who trained in al Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks came from Yemen.
Saada said his daughter came into contact with bin Laden’s circle as a teenager attending an Islamic religious school where she was a student of the wife of Rashad Mohammed Saeed, whom he described as an aide to the militant leader.
He said he did not receive any money from Saudi-born bin Laden for the marriage.
