Wife: Bin Laden Fathered 4 Kids While Hiding in Pakistan

In the nearly ten years between 9/11 and when a team of Navy Seals shot and killed him last May, Osama Bin Laden fathered four children while hiding in Pakistan, at least two of whom were born in government hospitals.

That’s the biggest attention-grabbing takeaway from testimony given to Pakistani investigators by the al-Qaida leader’s youngest wife. The police report containing Amal Ahmad Abdul Fateh’s account was dated Jan. 19, but was first reported on Thursday by a Pakistani newspaper, and has since been picked up by a number of U.S. media outlets.

The 30-year-old Fateh told investigators that she married Bin Laden in 2000 because she wanted to marry a holy warrior. She says that Bin Laden fled over the boarder into Pakistan in early 2002, shortly after the U.S. launched attacks on Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers.

The New York Times with some context:

Ms. Fateh’s words are paraphrased by a police officer, and there is noticeably little detail about the Pakistanis who helped her husband evade his American pursuers. Nevertheless, it raises more questions about how the world’s most wanted man managed to shunt his family between cities that span the breadth of Pakistan, apparently undetected and unmolested by the otherwise formidable security services

You can read the full Times article here.