Born: March 10, 1957

Hobby: Terrorist

• Early Life• Raised in Great wealth• A passion for religious politics• Joined the Afghan war• Formed “Al Qaeda”• Orchestrated First Terrorist Attacks• Declared Holy war Against United

States• Prime suspects In Attacks on America

• Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

• Birth date- March 10, 1957.

• Father- Muhammed Awad bin Laden.

• Mother-Hamida al-Attas.

• 52 stepbrothers and sisters.

• Bin Laden was raised as a devout Wahhabi Muslim.

• From 1968 to 1976 he attended the "élite" secular Al-Thager Model School.

• Bin Laden studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University.

• At the age of 17, bin Laden married his first wife Najwa Ghanem at Latakia.

• As of 2002 bin Laden had married four women and fathered roughly 25 or 26 children.

• Born in Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden was the son of

Mohammad bin Laden, one of the country's wealthiest business leaders. Some

sources state that he is the seventh son, while others claim that he is the

seventeenth of some 50 children born to the construction magnate and his various

wives. Young bin Laden led a privileged life, surrounded by pampering servants

and residing in air-conditioned houses well insulated from the oppressive desert

heat. He may have heard tales of poverty from his father, who started his career as

a destitute Yemeni porter. He moved to Saudi Arabia and eventually become the

owner of the kingdom's largest construction company.

• Young bin Laden attended schools in jedda, and was encouraged to marry

early, at the age of 17, to a Syrian girl and family relation. She was to be

the first of several wives. In 1979 he earned a degree in civil engineering

from King Abdul-Aziz University. He seemed to be preparing to join the

family business, but he did not continue on that course for long.

• Former classmates of bin Laden recall him as a frequent patron of Beirut

nightclubs, who drank and caroused with his Saudi royalty cohorts. Yet it

was also at the university that bin Laden met the Muslim fundamentalist

Sheik Abdullah Azzam, perhaps his first teacher of religious politics and his

earliest influence. Azzam spoke fervently of the need to liberate Islamic

nations from foreign interests and interventions, and he indoctrinated his

disciples in the strictest tenetsof the Muslim faith. Bin Laden, however,

would eventually cultivate a brand of militant religious extremism that

exceeded his teacher's.

• As a student in the late 1970s, bin Laden was galvanized by events that seemed to pit both the

Western world and communist Russia against Muslim nations. One of these was the Camp David

peace accords between Egypt and Israel; another was the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan. In

December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, bin Laden, like many other

Muslims, rose to join the jihad declared against the attackers. He did not initially enter the fray

as a soldier, but instead channeled his efforts into the organization and financing of the

mujahedeen, or Afghan resistance. Over the next ten years, he used his tremendous wealth to

buy arms, build training camps, and provide food and medical care. He was said to have

occasionally joined the fighting, and to have participated in the bloody siege of Jalalabad in

1989, in which Afghanistan wrested control from the Soviet Union.

• The United States, then embroiled in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, provided help to bin

Laden and his associates. Although in many respects he worked side by side with the Americans

to defeat the Soviets, bin Laden remained wary of the Western superpower. "To counter these

atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan," bin Laden later

told a French journalist in an interview quoted by the Public Broadcasting System's (PBS)

frontline. "I did not fight against the communist threat while forgetting the peril from the West.

… We had to fight on all fronts against communist or Western oppression."

• During the war, bin Laden forged connections with the Egyptian

Islamic Jihad, the militant group linked with the 1981

assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat. Under the influence of

this group, bin Laden was persuaded to help expand the jihad and

enlist as many Muslims as possible to rebel against so-called

infidel regimes. In 1988 he and the Egyptians founded Al Qaeda,

("The Base"), a network initially designed to build fighting power

for the Afghan resistance. Al Qaeda would later become known as

a radical Islamic group with bin Laden at the helm, and with the

United States as the key target for its terrorist acts.

• Bin Laden regarded even American humanitarian efforts as disgraces to Muslim

countries. The first terrorist attack believed to trace back to bin Laden involved the

December 1992 explosion of a bomb at a hotel in Aden, Yemen. American troops, en

route to Somalia for a humanitarian mission, had been staying at the hotel, but they

had already left. Two Austrian tourists were killed. Almost a year later, 18 American

servicemen were shot down over Mogadishu in Somalia. Bin Laden initially claimed

not to be involved in the attack, yet he later admitted to an Arabic newspaper that

he had played a role in training the guerrilla troops responsible for the attack.

• Several months later, on February 26, 1993, a bomb exploded in the parking garage

of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing six and injuring more than 1,000.

Though it has not been proven, bin Laden is widely suspected of being the mission's

ringleader. Many believe it was the terrorist leader's first attempt to destroy the

towers, which suicide hijackers succeeded in toppling in 2001. United States and

Saudi leaders pressured the Sudanese government to expel bin Laden. In 1996 he

left the country voluntarily, according to Sudanese officials.

• That same year, bin Laden openly declared war on America, calling

upon his followers to expel Americans and Jews from all Muslim

lands. In a statement quoted by PBS's Frontline, he called for

"fast-moving, light forces that work under complete secrecy."

Interviewed by Cable News Network (CNN) in 1997, bin Laden said,

"[The United States] has committed acts that are extremely

unjust, hideous, and criminal, whether directly or through its

support of the Israeli occupation." The following year he issued an

edict evoking even stronger language: "We - with God's help - call

on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded

to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their

money wherever and whenever they find it."

• Bin Laden's hatred for America had become well known, but nothing

had prepared Americans for the most extravagant and heinous plot

allegedly hatched by the terrorist leader: the September 11, 2001,

attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. On the clear, late-

summer morning, two hijacked commercial jets flew into the twin

towers of the World Trade Center. About an hour later, another

hijacked airliner slammed into the Pentagon in the nation's capital. A

fourth hijacked jet did not reach its target, crashing in Western

Pennsylvania instead. When the massive towers collapsed in flames,

thousands perished. Among those lost in New York, Washington, D.C.,

and Pennsylvania were the 19 hijackers, most of whom have been

linked to Al Qaeda operations. Bin Laden denied involvement in the

attacks, but he praised the hijackers for their acts.