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Bin Laden's Fifth Wife And
Her Father Held In Yemen

11-4-2

LONDON (PTI) -- Osama Bin Laden's fifth and favourite wife, Amal al-Sadah, has been arrested after a gun battle at her father's compound in Yemen, media reports said here today.
 
Amal al-Sadah, who is in her early twenties, has been placed under house arrest and questioned by the Yemeni authorities. Her father and brother have also been detained, The Sunday Times reported.
 
Quoting Arab diplomats, the report said, the shooting broke out at the family home in Ibb, south of the capital Sana'a, when security forces arrived last month.
 
Amal fled the American bombing of Afghanistan last year with her young daughter Safia under a meticulous plan worked out by Bin Laden to protect his three wives who were in Afghanistan at the time.
 
According to the report, one of Bin Laden's sons took Amal and her child from a house in the city of Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, to hide them, initially in caves. She was then smuggled across borders, first into Pakistan and then, earlier this year, to Yemen.
 
Bin Laden reportedly told her that she had to leave their home in Kandahar, and that she would not hear from him "for a long time."
 
She escaped from her hiding place in southern Afghanistan ,only to find herself closely guarded under house arrest in her father's compound.
 
According to Yemeni sources, her father and brother have been taken into custody, at least partly because of American pressure to obtain information about the fugitive Al-Qaeda leader and his web of international connections.
 
In a bitter will and testament that emerged last week, Bin Laden asked his wives not to marry again. He also asked his sons not to follow him into Al-Qaeda, the report said quoting Arabic magazine Al-Majallah.
 
Amal, who married Bin Laden when she was still a teenager is said to have been his favourite wife.
 
One of the other wives is understood to be travelling possibly in Iran, a second, the daughter of a senior Taliban, may still be in Afghanistan. The remaining wife, Najua Ghanem is in Saudi Arabia with her three children.
 
Bin Laden, 45, has married five times in all but is divorced from one wife, who is also from Saudi Arabia. He is thought to have more than 20 children.
 
Amal's father, who is a tribal patriarch in Yemen, is presumed to have had connections with Bin Laden - he gave her away to the Al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan and said at the time that he was "proud" to do so.
 
Sources in Yemen said her brother had gone to fight with Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and it was he who had suggested the match.
 
Copyright © 2002 Press Trust of India Ltd. All rights reserved.





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