Headlines
'Osama was dedicated to family, was concerned about welfare'
Washington, May 21
Declassified documents here
about Osama bin Laden reveal that he was a dedicated family man who
constantly worried about his four wives, 20 children and other relatives
and who sometimes issued detailed instructions about how they should
conduct themselves.
Bin Laden took minute interest in the
marriage plans of his son Khalid to the daughter of a "martyred" Al
Qaeda commander, and he exchanged a number of letters with the mother of
the bride-to-be. Bin Laden excitedly talked about the impending
nuptials "which our hearts have been looking forward to".
Bin
Laden corresponded at length with his son Hamza and with Hamza's mother,
Khairiah, who had spent around a decade in Iran under house arrest
following the Taliban's fall in neighbouring Afghanistan during the
winter of 2001.
Hamza wrote a heart-stirring letter to bin Laden
in 2009 in which he recalled how he had not seen his father since he was
13, eight years earlier: "My heart is sad from the long separation,
yearning to meet with you ... My eyes still remember the last time I saw
you when you were under the olive tree and you gave each one of us
Muslim prayer beads," reveal documents translated from Arabic to
English.
In 2010, the Iranians started releasing members of the
bin Laden family who had been living in Iran. Bin Laden spent many hours
writing letters to them and to his associates in Al Qaeda about how
best he could reunite with them.
In a letter to his wife Khairiah, he wrote tenderly: "How long have I waited for your departure from Iran."
Bin
Laden was paranoid that the Iranians -- who he said were "not to be
trusted" -- might insert electronic tracking devices into the belongings
or even the bodies of his family as they left Iran.
He told
Khairiah that if she had recently visited an "official dentist" in Iran
for a filling that she would need to have the filling taken out before
meeting with him as he worried a tracking device might have been
inserted inside.
US intelligence officials have a theory that bin
Laden might have been grooming Hamza eventually to succeed him at the
helm of Al Qaeda because, he felt, the son's relative youth would
energise Al Qaeda's base.
But Hamza never made it to his
father's hiding place in Abbottabad, the Pakistani garrison township in
Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province.
When the US SEALS raided bin
Laden's compound, they assumed Hamza would likely be one of the adult
males living there, but he was not.
US intelligence officials say they do not know where Hamza, now in his late 20s, is today.