Osama bin Laden's father-in-law has claimed he was against his daughter's marriage with the killed al-Qaeda leader, and that he completely lost touch with her after the 9/11 terror attacks.
Ahmed Abdul-Fattah al-Saada, the Yemeni father of bin Laden's youngest wife Amal al-Sada, said he had rejected a matchmaker's proposal of the marriage, and that he had no knowledge about bin Laden's terrorist ideology when he married his daughter in 1999.
He claimed he only knew that bin Laden had backed insurgents fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.
Al-Sada 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 one of bin Laden's aides, and he had never met his son-in-law in person.
Insisting that he did not receive any money from the Saudi-born terrorist leader for the marriage, al-Sada said he had to finally agree to the proposal when his daughter said that she wanted to marry bin Laden, the Daily Mail reports.
"I refused at first and insisted on knowing who this person was. After that they said that he was Osama bin Laden, from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia," al-Sada said, adding her daughter later "stuck to her view and told me she wanted to marry him, and I have not imposed a husband on any of my daughters. So I agreed."
He insisted that his daughter was just bin Laden's wife, and had no connection with the al-Qaeda, and also demanded that Amal and her children be returned to Yemen so that they can start a new life away from violence.
"We are not worried about the Americans interrogating her because she is just the wife of Osama bin Laden, and she and her children have no link to what he did. But I strongly reject handing to the American side this Yemeni citizen. She needs to return to her country," he added.
