Bin Laden's Former Bodyguard: "I wish I had killed him"

One of Osama bin Laden's top bodyguards during the height of bin Laden's reign has come out with a memoirs of his life with the al Qaeda leader and in that book, Nasser al-Bahri reveals much about bin Laden as well as his own regrets for allowing the carnage of 9/11.

From the article about al-Bahri's memoirs at Times Online:

Today he regrets his involvement. “I wish I had killed him,” al-Bahri told The Sunday Times last week through an interpreter on the telephone from Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, where he lives with his wife and three children.
“I regret not having killed him when I think how many civilians were killed in America,” he added, referring to the carnage in the twin towers.

Also revealed is one of bin Laden's greatest fears...that of being captured by Americans:

“He had a horror of ending up as a prisoner of the Americans,” said al-Bahri, 38, who worked for Bin Laden from 1996 to 2000 before returning home to Yemen.

It also sounds like most of the turmoil in bin Laden's life hasn't been trying to control a bunch of maniacal jihadis across the world but trying to keep peace among the stable of his five wives. I guess that multiple wife sanction of islam isn't all a bed of roses, eh?

Bin Laden, a secret fan of footie and Monty


In between plotting terror attacks and gloating about them on videos, Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted fugitive, is an extremely useful presence on the volleyball court, it has emerged.

“He is so tall that he does not need to jump up to do a smash,” said Nasser al-Bahri, one of the Al-Qaeda leader’s former bodyguards. His memoir, published in Paris last week, reveals another side of the West’s favourite bogeyman: besides his uses at the net, Bin Laden also likes playing football, preferably at centre forward. Even then, he never takes off his turban.

He is a voracious reader who enjoys quoting the memoirs of Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery and France’s General Charles de Gaulle; and besides his quest to set up a caliphate, he is passionate about racehorses, says the bodyguard.

Al-Bahri served in the Afghan mountains for four years as one of Bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants. He got to know the plotters of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States — he insists he had no idea what they were up to — as well as Bin Laden’s numerous children and wives.

Today he regrets his involvement. “I wish I had killed him,” al-Bahri told The Sunday Times last week through an interpreter on the telephone from Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, where he lives with his wife and three children.

“I regret not having killed him when I think how many civilians were killed in America,” he added, referring to the carnage in the twin towers.

Since then the terrorist who tops the FBI’s “most wanted” list seems to have run rings around the world’s biggest manhunt. His bearded visage, gangly frame and hectoring tone are known the world over from the videos he records to cock a snook at the enemy.

Al-Bahri, who believes Bin Laden is hiding in Waziristan, in northwestern Pakistan, thinks it unlikely he will be taken alive: he remembers “the sheikh” giving him a pistol and instructions to put “two bullets in my head” if they were about to be captured.

“He had a horror of ending up as a prisoner of the Americans,” said al-Bahri, 38, who worked for Bin Laden from 1996 to 2000 before returning home to Yemen. There he spent two years in jail, impressing the FBI with what one interrogator called an intelligence “goldmine”. Later he became a taxi driver and “business consultant”.

His memoir, In the Shadow of Bin Laden, is the first to have emerged from the inner circle. Written in collaboration with Georges Malbrunot, a distinguished French journalist, it offers an intriguing glimpse of life in the Al-Qaeda chief’s lair.

“He is more important than any of the prisoners we transferred to Guantanamo because he had direct access to Bin Laden,” said Michael Scheuer, a former member of a CIA group set up to track down the terrorist leader.

Bin Laden’s domestic life was no bed of roses, according to the bodyguard. Careful to avoid conflict with his four wives — each was trained in the use of a Kalashnikov — he was powerless to stop the first, a “seductive” but uneducated Syrian and the mother of seven of his children, from being fiercely jealous of the second, an older, more erudite woman from Saudi Arabia whom Bin Laden would often consult on matters of “Islamic science”. They, in turn, bitterly resented the arrival of a fifth bride in 2000 from Yemen, the homeland of Bin Laden’s billionaire father, especially when she turned out to be a 17-year-old.

“They told me she was 30,” was Bin Laden’s explanation to his children when they complained their new stepmother was younger than they were.

He would often threaten to “whip” his children but seldom did so. They suffered, nonetheless, from a tight-fisted streak in their father, who was reluctant to share any of the family money with his offspring. “My fortune is not for you; it is for Islam,” he would tell them when they asked for money. “You won’t have a penny of it.”

Al-Bahri, who was paid $94 a month, says there was sometimes dissent in the ranks. Whenever anyone complained about the shortage of food, Bin Laden would lecture his troops about the “ascetic life of the prophet” and how Muhammad’s followers had never grumbled about their lot.

Aspiring “martyrs” such as al-Bahri had come from all over the Arab world to secure a terrorist’s training and win a place in paradise by blowing themselves up. Not all were cut out for a life of privation: a group of 15 went home in 1998, tired of being starved and under constant threat of American missile attacks; and one of the plotters of the September 11 attacks had to abandon Afghanistan after a severe attack of diarrhoea, al-Bahri said.

Life was so tough in Afghanistan that Bin Laden sent al-Bahri on a mission to Somalia to see if it would make a better Al-Qaeda headquarters. At the same time the bodyguard sensed that something big was being planned: Bin Laden spoke of an event that would soon “shake” the world.

This worried him: unlike other Al-Qaeda lieutenants, he was not afraid to argue with the leader and had confronted him over the killing of so many Muslims in attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.

Bin Laden retorted: “When the Americans bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, do you think that they took into consideration collateral damage?”

Al-Bahri, who spends his time these days trying to persuade militants not to join the jihad, or holy war, against the West, said that a few days before the American attacks Bin Laden had fled to a safe house in the Afghan city of Kandahar. There he ordered an aide to rig up a satellite link so that he could watch the mayhem on television. He was bitterly disappointed when they failed to get any reception.