[Clintoni]

Bin Laden niece back in America to seek pop fame
Sarah Baxter



THE niece of Osama Bin Laden has returned to New York in the hope of becoming a pop star after leaving the city weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
“I am lost, I don’t fit anywhere. I am American. I want to live here,” Wafah Bin Ladin, 25, said last week.



She spells her surname differently from the world’s most wanted terrorist but there is no disguising her family background.

“Because of this last name that I have nothing to do with, the western world hates me, and because I’ve chosen American values, the Saudi Arabian world hates me,” the singer lamented.

Her mother, Carmen Bin Ladin, lives in Geneva and has been separated for 15 years from her husband, Yeslam, the half-brother of the terrorist mastermind.

“Thank God my blessed mother took her daughters away to Switzerland or I would have been forced into life under the veil,” Wafah Bin Ladin told the New York Post. “She left for freedom, which is what America believes in. That’s all I want. The freedom to not be scared all the time.”

Yeslam Bin Ladin maintains that he has had no contact with Osama for years. He has been accused in a lawsuit filed by victims of the September 11 attacks of “providing material financial support to international terrorism” through his half-brother, but has vigorously rejected such allegations.

“My father doesn’t speak to us. I don’t know him,” Wafah said. “He is very wealthy. Saudi men command all the power and law. I have no protection.

I don’t speak Arabic. I don’t have a Saudi passport. I play guitar, I write and sing music.”

Wafah is known as a party girl, who once danced with President George W Bush’s daughter Jenna at a nightclub in the south of France.

She was living in a loft rented for $6,000 (£3,200) a month in New York, but left for Switzerland about a month before the attacks.

She went on to London but missed New York. “Even here I am frightened. I am victimised by association,” she said. “But I can’t keep hiding. I can’t live this way. I ask nothing but to be accepted in the United States.”

Her mother, who is of Swiss and Persian descent, has published a memoir in which she recalls meeting Osama while playing at home with Wafah. He refused to speak to or look at his sister-in-law because she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.

Carmen’s marriage to Yeslam disintegrated when he expected their children to be brought up conservatively. “My husband doesn’t even acknowledge his daughters when he sees them on the street,” she said.

According to Wafah, her mother fears “some fundamentalist will do away with me” because of her new career. She is currently working on an album and demo tape under the name Wafah Dufour (her mother’s maiden name) and describes her voice as “sort of Chrissie Hynde” — a reference to the vocalist with The Pretenders.

She added: “I am not a bimbo. I don’t want sympathy. I only ask that people try to understand.”