Asleep in the guest room at his grandmother’s home in Jeddah, a 20-year-old man is woken from a deep sleep by a wailing from another room.
Seconds later, his door is thrown open and his uncle comes rushing in. ‘Come quickly!’ he cries.
‘See what your father has done! He has ruined all our lives! He has destroyed us!’
Not yet fully awake, the young man soon finds himself in front of a television screen where he can scarcely believe the images unfolding before his eyes.
Everyone remembers where they were on September 11, 2001. But for Omar bin Laden, the shock of what he saw was magnified by conflicting emotions.
The fourth son of Osama bin Laden, he had recently fled his father’s side in Afghanistan and insists he had no idea his father had been planning the biggest terrorist atrocity the world has known. Indeed, it was only after months of torment that Omar finally accepted that the man who raised him was behind the attack.
‘The words and images were too horrific to comprehend,’ he says. 'Although my uncle had expressed his worst fears, none of us could truly believe that someone we knew, someone we had loved, had anything to do with the catastrophic events we were watching.
‘It seemed impossible for my father to be the one responsible for the chaos and death going on in America. The attack I was seeing was far too vast, something that only another superpower could organise.’
Re: My bizarre and terrifying childhood with my father, Osama bin Laden
Look at his 1997 pic, the dude is no kid. Where was he in last 8 yrs, living in a cave? He just realized that his dad was behind this or was he just able to escape?
Look at his 1997 pic, the dude is no kid. Where was he in last 8 yrs, living in a cave? He just realized that his dad was behind this or was he just able to escape?
I guess this interview is to promote his new book, but I've seen him interviewed multiple times before over the last 5 years.
