Bin Laden told his children to live peacefully in West

Slain al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden urged his children to live peacefully in the West and get a university education, his brother-in- law said in an interview published yesterday.

Zakaria al-Sadah, the brother of bin Laden’s Yemeni fifth wife Amal, told Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper that the Saudi-born extremist believed his children “should not follow him down the road to jihad”.

“He told his own children and grandchildren, ‘Go to Europe and America and get a good education,’” al-Sadah told the Sunday Times.

Al-Sadah said bin Laden told them: “You have to study, live in peace and don’t do what I am doing or what I have done.”

Bin Laden was killed in a commando raid in May 2011 by US Navy SEALS at a house in the garrison town of Abbottabad, northwest Pakistan, where he had been living for several years.

Al-Sadah said that in November he saw his sister for the first time since she was shot in the knee during the raid, and had since been allowed to have a number of meetings with her in the presence of guards.

He said the three wives and nine children who were in the compound — some are bin Laden’s children and others his grandchildren — have been held for months in a three-room flat in Islamabad. The Sunday Times published what it said was the first photograph to show some of the young children from the compound: two sons and a daughter, and two grandsons and a granddaughter. The children were still traumatised after seeing the raid in which bin Laden died, al-Sadah said.

“These children have seen their father killed and they need a caring environment, not a prison — whatever you think of their father and what he has done,” he said.