Osama bin Laden’s mother: He was a very good kid and he loved me so much

Baku. 3 August. REPORT.AZ/ Alia Ghanem, Osama bin Laden’s mother gave an interview to The Guardian, Report informs citing the Gazeta.ru. On chairs nearby sit two of her surviving sons, Ahmad and Hassan, and her second husband, Mohammed al-Attas, the man who raised all three brothers.

“My life was very difficult because he was so far away from me,” she says, speaking confidently. “He was a very good kid and he loved me so much.” Now in her mid-70s and in variable health, Ghanem points at al-Attas – a lean, fit man dressed, like his two sons, in an immaculately pressed white thobe, a gown worn by men across the Arabian peninsula. “He raised Osama from the age of three. He was a good man, and he was good to Osama.”

Sitting between Osama’s half-brothers, Ghanem recalls her firstborn as a shy boy who was academically capable. He became a strong, driven, pious figure in his early 20s, she says, while studying economics at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, where he was also radicalised. “The people at university changed him,” Ghanem says. “He became a different man.” He was a very good child until he met some people who pretty much brainwashed him in his early 20s. He would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much.

The family say they last saw Osama in Afghanistan in 1999, a year in which they visited him twice at his base just outside Kandaha.