Aide recounts playing match-maker to Osama and his favourite wife - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

A former advisor of Osama Bin Laden has revealed how he helped the Al Qaeda chief find his fifth and favourite wife. Sheikh Rashad Mohammed Saeed Ismael alias Abu al-Fida, a Yemeni aide, recounts that Osama wanted to marry a Yemeni girl to cement his relationship with his billionaire father’s homeland. “She had to be religious, obedient, generous, well brought-up, quiet, calm and young enough not to feel jealous of the sheikh’s other wives. Multiple wives tend to vie for attention out of jealousy and end up in catfights, and Laden did not want his new wife to get engrossed in such issues,” The Times quoted Fida, as saying. Fida knew just the girl in his hometown of Ibb. He believed Amal al-Sadah, a civil servant’s daughter, aged 18, would make the perfect wife for Osama, then 43. “Coming from a modest Yemeni family, she could live with him the tough life in mountain caves and be someone he could mould. She was also someone who did not mind marrying a man as old as her father, and truly believed that being a dutiful and obedient wife to her husband would grant her a place in heaven,” Fida said. A year before the 9/11 attacks, Fida got the consent of the girl’s family, and a meeting with Amal followed. “I told her: you know of Laden, who gave away his palaces and fortune to wage jihad on behalf of Muslims. He lives in Afghanistan , sometimes in fear for his life, sometimes secured; sometimes in a city and a house, at other times in a mountain and a cave on the run,” he said. When she agreed for the marriage, her father gave Fida permission to take her to Afghanistan . The wedding ceremony in the grounds of a compound was conducted by Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, Al-Qaeda’s then chief financial officer. Fida further revealed that Amal delivered a baby girl in Kandahar , within days of the attacks on New York and Washington . “About a week after my arrival in Yemen we got news that Amal had delivered a baby girl whom they called Safiyah,” Fida said.