Washington: Osama bin Laden’s youngest wife Amal al-Sadah , who is now in the custody of Pakistani agencies ” was a quiet, polite, easygoing and confident teenager” who came from a big, conservative family in Yemen, a relative told an American television in an exclusive interview.
The relative said she came from a traditional family in Ibb, Yemen — established and respectable but certainly with no militant views paralleling the al Qaeda leader’s terrorism.
The family had no connection to al Qaeda prior to the arranged marriage, Ahmed said, adding that he heard many stories about how the two were engaged.
The Sadah family is a big family in Ibb. The family of Amal was like most Yemeni families. They were conservative but also lived a modern life when compared to other families.
Ahmed said. “The government tells them that the information or comments they give would be misunderstood or misinterpreted and could hurt the family more than the government.”
An al Qaeda figure in Yemen named Sheikh Rashed Mohammed Saeed Ismail said he arranged the marriage and told the Yemen Post in 2008 that he was “the matchmaker” and that al-Sadah was one of his students, describing her as “religious enough.”
Ismail, whose brother spent time as a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, accompanied the young bride-to-be to Afghanistan in July 2000, where she and bin Laden were married after he gave her family a $5,000 dowry.
al-Sadah has told Pakistani interrogators that for five years, she didn’t venture outside the walled compound.
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