A marriage MADE IN HELL
In the dramatic U.S. raid ... and in an astonishing that killed Bin Laden, his twist, has wed the son Hamza escaped. Now daughter of Mohamed he’s taken on his father’s Atta — most infamous jihad against the West ... of the 9/11 hijackers
HIS FATHEr was Osama Bin Laden, once the world’s most wanted man. And now Hamza Bin Laden, his son and heir, has reputedly married the daughter of one of the 9/11 hijackers, to create what would be an extraordinary dynasty of terror.
Incredibly, he is reported to have wed the daughter of Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born terrorist who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Centre, one of four hijacked planes that hit targets in Washington and New York.
The disclosure was made by Bin Laden’s family to Martin Chulov, the Guardian’s respected Middle East correspondent.
‘We have heard he [Hamza] has married the daughter of Mohamed Atta,’ Ahmad al-Attas, a half-brother of the dead terror leader, told Chulov. ‘We’re not sure where he is, but it could be in Afghanistan.’
Hamza’s new bride is, apparently, from Egypt, where Atta spent his youth and his 20s. Atta had studied engineering at university in Cairo, then moved to study in Hamburg, where he became evermore radicalised in his support for extremist Islam.
It’s thought that in the late Nineties he formed links with Al Qaeda, and headed to Afghanistan where he discussed the plan to strike America with Osama Bin Laden.
He’s believed to have set up a terrorist cell back in Hamburg that included two of the other 9/11 hijackers, and in June 2000 flew to New Jersey.
After that, he took flying lessons in Florida and eventually booked himself onto American Airlines Flight 11, with consequences that shook the world.
Although the jihadi was said to have little interest in sex — Chulov writes that ‘some accounts of his adult life had portrayed him as an avowed virgin’ — his daughter is believed to have been born some time around 2001.
CHULOv writes of Hamza Bin Laden: ‘His marriage to the daughter of Atta . . . appears to confirm that the 9/11 alumni remain a central hub of Al Qaeda and the group continues to be organised around Osama Bin Laden’s legacy.’
The extraordinary report about the wedding emerged from an interview conducted by Chulov with Bin Laden’s mother at the family home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which she shares with two of Osama’s half-brothers and her second husband, who raised Osama from the age of three.
Osama’s mother, Alia Ghanem, told Chulov that in the years after her son became a terrorist leader, ‘my life was very difficult because he was so far away from me. He was a very good kid and he loved me so much’.
She went on: ‘He was a very good child until he met some people who pretty much brainwashed him in his early 20s. You can call it a cult. They got money for their cause.
‘I would always tell him to stay away from them, and he would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much.’
She claimed it never crossed her mind that her son would become a jihadi. But now her grandson Hamza is following the same path, too.
Hamza Bin Laden’s marriage to the daughter of suicide pilot Mohamed Atta was discussed during the interview by her two sons, who were also present. Such a remarkable union is a story that will put Osama Bin Laden’s most militant child under the spotlight once more.
Last year, Hamza was added to the U.S. Specially Designated Global Terrorist list after he was ‘determined to have committed, or posed a serious risk of committing, acts of terrorism that threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security’.
Like his father, Hamza has spent much of his life on the run. His father was killed — but Hamza miraculously escaped — when, in the early hours of May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy Seals arrived to take out the man who cost 3,000 lives on September 11, 2001.
In a shoot-to-kill operation sanctioned by President Barack Obama, the Navy Seals had flown through the night aboard Black Hawk helicopters to Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, an affluent town outside Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.
There, for six years, the world’s most wanted man had been living in a custom-built million-dollar house inside a walled compound with his three wives, as well as a number of his children and grandchildren, including Hamza.
Everything changed on the night the Bin Laden clan were roused by the sound of American helicopters.
With night vision goggles and lasers picking out targets, a U.S. Seal team overwhelmed armed fanatics guarding the compound, before entering Bin Laden’s house and moving from room to room.
THE building had been plunged into darkness moments before the raid, when CIA spies cut the power supplies. In the gloom, Khalid, another of Osama’s sons, encountered the Seals on the staircase, and was shot dead.
While women and children were pushed to the ground, their hands tied with plastic binds, the Seals encountered Bin Laden in the third floor, and fired at him as he darted into a bedroom. He was found cowering inside, standing behind a woman with his hands on her shoulders.
robert O’Neill, a long-serving Navy Seal, shot Bin Laden twice in the head and once in the body as he fell to the ground. Another Seal fired more bullets into the body. With adrenaline pumping, O’Neill radioed his commanders: ‘For God and country — Geronimo! Geronimo! Geronimo!’ and added: ‘Geronimo! E.K.I.A’ (enemy killed in action).
A jubilant Obama, watching the unfolding drama from the White House, crowed: ‘We got him.’
rumours swirled that not all went as planned — and that, incredibly, Bin Laden’s favoured son and heir escaped under the noses of the U.S. special forces.
That appears to be true. Known as the Crown Prince of Terror, Hamza Bin Laden was even pronounced dead by the White House in the aftermath of the raid — only for U.S. officials to later retract this and claim another son had died.
Certainly, Hamza today remains alive and well, having been groomed for a life of terror as a child at jihadi training camps.
Photogenic and charismatic, he is reportedly being used by Al Qaeda’s leadership to help ‘revive the brand’ of the terror
group after it was eclipsed by Islamic State.
Now reputedly 29, Hamza wears his father’s trademark turban and always carries a Kalashnikov, and as a true chip off the old block, he is calling for the blood of Western-ers to be spilt.
In a chilling video message, signalling his bid to become a global player in terrorism, Hamza — who bears an uncanny resem-blance to his late father — warned his enemies in the West that ‘we will continue striking and targeting you in your country and abroad’.
In what Arabic media described as a strategic step to prove he has taken up his father’s mantle, Hamza railed for 21 minutes against the West before calling on Muslims around the world to avenge his father’s death.
‘If you think your sinful crime that you committed in Abbotta-bad has passed without punish-ment, then you are wrong,’ he said in one video posted online.
‘As for the revenge by the Islamic nation for Sheik Osama, may Allah have mercy on him, it is not revenge for Osama the person, but it is revenge for those who defended Islam,’ Hamza added.
In other videos, he calls for ‘lone wolf’ attacks — where Muslims living in Europe randomly murder ‘infidel targets’, a tactic horrifically demonstrated in France and Germany in recent years — telling his followers it is ‘their duty’ to target Britain, America and other Western allies.
So should we be worried by Bin Laden junior’s attempts to foment bloodshed? Or is he just another crazed extremist best dismissed and ignored as he rants from an unknown location?
Sadly, whatever we may make of his comments, Hamza Bin Laden is establishing a following among young potential fighters around the world, having established his ‘jihadist’ credentials before he was into his teens.
His father was a member of a hugely wealthy family in Saudi Arabia when Hamza was born in Jeddah, the capital, in 1989. At the time, the clan were pillars of Saudi society, making fortunes from the construction industry.
But his father spent much of the time in Afghanistan, fighting with other Islamic ‘mujahideen’ against the Soviets, who eventually pulled out in the year of Hamza’s birth.
With the Soviets defeated, Osama poured some of the family millions into setting up terror camps to fight America, their former back-ers in Afghanistan.
As a result, Osama and his family were expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1992 because of his links to terror groups and moved to Sudan, where Hamza spent his early childhood.
Under pressure from the U.S. after Bin Laden established terror training camps in the African desert in 1996, Sudan struck a deal to allow Bin Laden, his three wives and 26 children to leave for a country of their choice.
They headed again to Afghani-stan, where Bin Laden declared war on America, and plotted the atrocities on New York and Washington.
So it was that Hamza grew up in an environment of guns and terror plots, and he took to it like a natural. He was encouraged by his father, and was trained in how to use weapons before he was ten.
His mother was the favourite among Osama’s three wives. Called Khairiah Sabar, she was known as Umm Hamza, meaning mother of Hamza, her only boy, who also became Osama’s favourite son.
By the age of 14, Hamza had already claimed his first ‘kill’ of the enemy. In a video called The Mujahideen Of Waziristan, released in 2005, Hamza and fellow Al Qaeda terrorists are seen in a fierce fire-fight with Pakistani government soldiers on the border with Afghan-istan, with the camera showing a triumphant Hamza in camouflage gear clutching a gun among several dead enemy soldiers.
WHILE two other of Bin Laden’s sons died because of their terror activi-ties, Hamza was reportedly wounded by bounty hunters chasing his father in the mountains of Afghanistan after 9/11.
He was also reported to have been killed during clashes in the Pakistani province of Balochistan in 2003, aged just 14, when he was fighting with another Bin Laden son, who was later killed in a drone strike. Yet reports of Hamza’s death proved to false.
Another brother, Omar Bin Laden, who rejected terrorism and now lives in Egypt, remembers how Hamza read out a poem calling for jihad during a family wedding in Afghanistan. ‘What crime have we committed to be forced to leave out country?’ said Hamza as his family cheered. ‘We will fight the kaffir (infidels) for ever!’
By the age of 16 he was linked to a plot to assassinate Benazir Bhutto, the former leader of Pakistan, who died in a hail of bullets and explosions during a campaign rally in 2007.
Shortly before her death, Bhutto, who was educated in Britain, named Hamza as one of four Al Qaeda terrorists planning to kill her because of her pro-Western outlook.
Ever since his father was killed in the raid on Abbottabad, Hamza has been on the run. Experts now believe that he, too, is hiding in Pakistan on the lawless border with Afghanistan, where Ayman Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s successor as the leader of Al Qaeda, is grooming him to take over.
Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brook-ings Institution, a Washington think-tank, told me: ‘Hamza is the future of Al Qaeda — the charis-matic new face of the organisation with a unique claim to legitimacy by birth that resonates powerfully in the global jihad.
‘Al Qaeda is far from a spent force so Hamza is a serious problem. Terror attacks such as Nice [when a lorry attack killed more than 80 people in 2016], and others in France and Germany, is exactly what he had called for.’
And now, it seems, he has at his side a bride raised in the knowl-edge that her own father was at the heart of the monstrous attack that killed thousands and sparked the War on Terror.
There could hardly be a more chilling prospect.