Thaindian News

London, June 22 (IANS) Amal Ahmed al-Sadah, the youngest wife of Osama bin Laden, who has been held in Pakistan since the US special forces killed the Al Qaeda leader May 2, will return to her native Yemen, a media report said Wednesday.

Sadah, who married Osama in 1999, was wounded in the US operation in the garrison town of Abbottabad where her husband was hiding. She is believed to have been questioned by US intelligence services.

Media reports in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, confirmed by officials in Riyadh, indicate that arrangements have been finalised between Yemeni and Pakistani diplomats for the return of Sadah, 29, and her 12-year-old daughter, Safiya, who was also injured in the raid, according to the Guardian.

Osama’s third and fourth wives were also found at the compound by Pakistani authorities after the US raid. Both were born in Osama’s home town of Jeddah, on the southern Red Sea coast, and are Saudi citizens, the report said.

The oldest, Khairiah Sabar, married the former Taliban leader in 1985. The third wife held by the Pakistanis, Siham Sabar, was married in 1987. Both women are college graduates.

Officials in Riyadh told the Guardian that, at least theoretically, there was no objection to their return to Saudi Arabia. Their husband, who was 57 when he died, was stripped of his Saudi Arabian citizenship in 1994 after he turned against the rulers of the kingdom, which he eventually fled, after the first Gulf war.

Hamza, a 22-year-old son of Osama was killed in the raid. The bodies of both men were buried at sea. The women and about 10 of Osama’s children and grandchildren were handcuffed by special forces who then left.

Sadah’s brother, Zakria al-Sadah, told the Yemen Times this week that Yemeni diplomats in Pakistan had told him his sister would “arrive in the coming days” after the completion of legal formalities.

Sadah fled from Afghanistan with her daughter in the months after the Sep 11 attacks and is believed to have told investigators she had spent five years in the compound in Pakistan without leaving the gates.

Osama’s two other wives - two earlier marriages ended in divorce - fled the Al Qaeda leader’s base near Kandahar in late 2001 and were driven by a trusted associate into Pakistan, according to interrogation files from the Guantánamo Bay detention centre recently released by WikiLeaks and published by the Guardian.

Sadah, whose father is a minor civil servant, told her friends and family she wanted to “go down in history”, according to her cousin, Waleed Hashem Abdel-Fatah al-Sadah.

Weeks after the proposal, a dowry of $5,000 was wired by Osama and, accompanied by an intermediary, Sadah travelled through Dubai and Pakistan to Afghanistan to meet her bridegroom for the first time.

When the family learned through a courier that she had given birth to a daughter, a group of relatives travelled to Afghanistan, where they spent a month, the Guardian said.

On the final day of the visit, a cousin recalled Osama telling the young mother she could stay with him in Afghanistan or return home with her family. “I want to be martyred with you and I won’t leave as long as you’re alive,” he recalled her saying.