SANAA:
The youngest widow of slain al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden will return home to Yemen from Pakistan in the coming days, her brother said on Wednesday.
Amal Abdulfattah’s family was informed by “the foreign ministries of Yemen and Pakistan of plans concerning the return of Amal and her five children to Yemen in the coming days,” Zakariya Abdulfattah told AFP.
“There have been diplomatic arrangements between the Yemeni and the Pakistani parties to secure her return to her country and we have received promises that it will take place soon,” he said.
Her family had demanded last month that she and her children be repatriated from Pakistan where she is being detained.
Her brother had said that he has received assurances from the Yemeni ambassador in Islamabad that she is ‘in good health’ despite sustaining a gunshot wound to the leg during the US commando raid that killed Bin Laden.
US intelligence services have reportedly interrogated three of Bin Laden’s widows.
Twenty-nine year old Amal was married to Bin Laden in 1999 through a local matchmaker, the brother said, adding that she travelled to Afghanistan to join her husband.
Saudi-born Bin Laden was already married to two other women – the first of whom was his Syrian cousin Najwa al-Ghanem – as Islam permits men to have as many as four wives.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 23rd, 2011.
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