Osama bin Laden: No mercy

Geneva, July 11 (AP): Osama bin Laden’s sister-in-law describes him as a man so driven by his beliefs that he would deny a water bottle to his own infant son in the heat of the Saudi desert.

“I’m sure Osama would not have wanted to lose his baby” by his insistence his wife use a spoon instead of a bottle, says Carmen BinLadin, the Swiss sister-in-law of the alleged terrorist mastermind. “It was not as if he didn’t care about the child. But to him, the baby’s suffering was less important than a principle which he probably imagined stemmed from some seventh-century verse in the Quran.”

But she said the respect her husband and Osama’s 23 other brothers accorded him by accepting his decisions made her realise she would have to leave Saudi Arabia with her daughters. And it was part of what convinced her that the brothers haven’t stopped supporting Osama despite their disavowals of him.

“My understanding of that culture and from what I have seen and what I have read, I cannot believe that they have cut off Osama completely,” BinLadin said on the eve of a visit to the US to promote her book, Inside the Kingdom, to be published next Wednesday.

She said some of Osama’s sons are still in Saudi Arabia, working for the bin Laden group construction company the 25 brothers inherited from their father, Mohammed bin Laden. She added that she believed some of Osama’s sisters also still side with him.