About 30 members of
Osama bin Laden’s
family are under house confinement in Iran, according to the Saudi daily Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat and The New York Times.
His teenage daughter escaped a supervised shopping excursion last month and headed for the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Tehran where she is now holed up. She was able to telephone family members abroad and solve a mystery about the family that is eight years old.
Omar bin Laden, one of Osama’s sons, broke ties with his father before the 9/11 attacks and now lives in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. He told the newspapers his sister, 19-year-old Iman bin Laden, fled to the Saudi Arabia Embassy in hopes of reuniting with her biological mother, Najwa al-Ghanem.
Omar said this is the first time his family has contacted him and this is the first time he has been able to confirm their whereabouts. Six siblings—Saad, Othman, Fatima, Hamzah, Iman and Bakr, aged 30 to 15—are confined by the Islamic Republic.
Saad reportedly had a minor role in al-Qaeda missions. American officials announced last summer that they believed Saad bin Laden was killed by an American missile fired from a drone while traveling from Iran to Pakistan. But Omar said his sister reported that Saad had been in Iran since 2001, along with the other siblings.
The Saudi embassy confirmed that Iman was in the embassy and said it is working to send her “in dignity to her family and relatives,” said Fuad Qassas, a Saudi diplomat in Tehran. The Iranian Foreign Ministry announced it would give her travel documents if the Saudi government could prove who she was—a statement that suggested Iran had confined her for eight years without knowing who she was.
Iman has been living with about 30 family members in a comfortable compound in Tehran ever since 2001; she has had no education in those eight years. Some of the 30 relatives were born in Iran since 2001.
The family left Afghanistan a little before the 9/11 attacks to journey home to Saudi Arabia. The Times of London reported they were detained when they tried to enter Iran. Guards told them they were not allowed to leave “for their own safety.”
Omar denies his family is under house arrest but says security personnel accompany his family whenever they leave the compound. He said his family is treated well in Iran but they have been denied official documents that would permit them to leave the country.
“I have today 11 nephews and nieces who were born in Afghanistan or Iran but I have not seen them,” Omar said.
“I appeal to the Syrian Government to intervene due to its good relationship with Iran, particularly as my brothers and sisters are innocent and had nothing to do with the others’ disputes with our father,” Omar said, reported Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat. “We lived in Afghanistan because it was normal for children to live where their parents lived,” he added.
“Now and after eight and a half years, the situation has changed. There are several places where [my family] wish to move so as to be with their families and mothers,” Omar was quoted as saying.
In 2005, Ali Larijani, then secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, told reporters, “When the Americans bombed that country [Afghanistan in 2001], some people crossed this border. But we extradited them or sent them back.”
It was known that some of the bin Laden family had reached Iran. It was never known there were so many of them until now. Also, it has long been debated whether the bin Ladens were jailed, under some kind of restraint or allowed to actively engage in terrorism. Cellphone calls from some Saudi terrorists captured in Saudi Arabia a few years ago were traced to Iran, and Saad bin Laden was the presumed contact.
