Osama bin Laden Age, Death, Wife, Children, Family, Biography & More

Some Lesser Known Facts About Osama bin Laden

• Did Osama bin Laden smoke?: No

• Did Osama bin Laden drink alcohol?: No

• Laden’s mother, Hamida al-Attas was the tenth wife of his father, Mohammed bin Laden.

• He was the 17th of 52 children born to Mohammed bin Laden.

• Soon after, Laden was born, his father divorced his mother and recommended Hamida to Mohammed al-Attas, a close associate.

• His father, Mohammed bin Laden was a millionaire and had a construction business in the Middle East.

• Mohammed bin Laden was very close and had a very good rapport with the Saudi royal family.

• His father, Mohammed died in 1967 in an airplane crash in Saudi Arabia.

• Bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim.

• When he was studying at a University in Saudi Arabia, his main interest was religious studies but obtained degrees in other fields.

• Laden had an olive complexion, used to work with his left hand and walked with the help of a walking stick.

• In 1979, he went to Afghanistan and western Pakistan to resist the Soviet invasion. He supplied money and other needs from his father’s company to support the jihadist movement against the Soviet Union’s invasion.

• Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supported the extremist Islamic groups in the 1980s including bin Laden’s and sent them weapons and over $1 billion when they were fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

• According to the former CIA analyst, Michael Scheuer, Laden used to hate western ideology: immoral acts of fornication, intoxicants, communism, socialism, democracy, homosexuality, gambling, usury, and their secular forms of the government.

• He believed that injustices against Muslims and Muslim countries had been perpetrated by the United States and other non-Muslim states.

• He wanted the U.S. to withdraw its forces from the Middle East.

• According to Laden, Sharia law was the ultimate solution to set things right in the Muslim World.

• Apart from the Soviet Union invasion, his hatred towards westernization also caused him to lay the foundation of Al-Qaeda in 1988.

• During the late 1990s, he became very hostile to Americans and announced to kill Americans including civilians.

• As per many sources, he was anti-semitic (Anti-Jew). According to him, Israel should not have existed. In May 1998, in an interview with ABC’s John Miller, Laden stated that the Israeli state’s ultimate goal was to annex the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East into its territory and enslave its peoples, as part of what he called a “Greater Israel.”

• Laden opposed the music for the Muslims.

• In his first interview in the late 1990s, he publicly criticized Saudi Arabia for its dependence on the U.S. military, arguing that the two holiest shrines of Islam; Mecca and Medina, the places in which the Prophet Mohamed received and recited Allah’s message, should only be protected by the Muslims.

• Laden had many bodyguards and his arsenal included SAM-7 and Stinger missiles, RPGs, AK-47s, and PK machine guns.

• He continued to denounce Saudi Arabia and its king, Fahd. In 1994, Fahd stripped Laden of his Saudi citizenship in response.

• Laden claimed that he got inspiration to knock down the World Trade Center after watching the ruins of the towers in Lebanon by Israel during the 1982 Lebanon War.

• 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger airlines which departed from the northeastern part of the United States to California. At 8:45 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, two of the planes, United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 were crashed into the North and South towers of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan, New York. Within an hour and 42 minutes, both 110-story towers collapsed. A third plane got crashed into the Pentagon (Headquarter of the United States Department of Defense) in Arlington County, Virginia.

• The attack on the World Trade Center killed around 3000 people and injured thousands of others. It caused at least $10 billion in damages.

• Since 2001, Laden had been the most-wanted for America. FBI put a $25 million bounty on him in their search for him.

• According to one of his wives, after the 9/11 attack, Laden took his wives and children to an Al-Qaeda safehouse in Peshawar, Pakistan in 2002. In June 2005, Laden, along with his family moved to Abbottabad.

• Laden evaded the arrest and attack by the U.S. Forces for the next 10 years. In August 2010, CIA cast doubt on a compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan and identified it as the likely location of Laden. The compound was situated only 1.3 km (0.8 mi.) southwest to the Pakistan Military Academy.

• To identify the residents of the Abbottabad compound, the CIA organized a fake vaccination program with doctor Shakil Afridi. Nurses were sent to the compound to vaccinate children to extract the DNA, which could later be compared to a sample from his sister, who died in Boston in 2010.

• In 2011, CIA became sure that Laden was residing in the Abbottabad compound. To find and kill him, Operation Neptune’s Spear was permitted by the then U.S. President Barack Obama.

• President Obama along with his national security team watched the operation live.

• On May 2, 2011, shortly after 1:00 am PKT (Pakistan Standard Time) (20:00 UTC, May 1), the members of the United States special operations forces and Navy Seals entered in his safe house and shot on his upper part of left the eye and chest.

• Apart from Osama bin Laden, some others were killed by the U.S. Navy SEALs members on 2 May; Laden’s son Khalid bin Laden (23), Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti (Messenger of Laden), Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s brother Abrar and Bushra, and Abrar’s wife.

• After the 40 minutes raid, the U.S. forces took Laden’s body to Afghanistan for identification, then buried him at North Arabian Sea within 24 hours.

• On May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama addressed the country and the World at 11:35 pm EST that Laden had been killed in Pakistan by the United States Navy Seals.

• Death was confirmed by Al-Qaeda on May 6, vowing to avenge the kill on its website.

• Robert O’Neill, a U.S. Navy SEAL who later claimed to have shot Osama bin Laden.

• A retired senior U.S. intelligence official later disclosed that a former ISI officer approached the U.S. embassy station chief in Islamabad and agreed to reveal Laden’s location, in return for the $25 million rewards.