Omar Osama bin Laden, son of notorious al-Quaida leader Osama bin Laden, is back in the news again as he and his wife, Jane Felix-Browne, who has taken the name Zaina Alsahah, plan a horse race across North Africa to promote peace.
So who is Jane Felix-Browne? And why would this 52-year-old grandmother wed the 26-year-old son of the most wanted man in the world?
Jane Felix-Browne, a British woman, married five times previously, with five grandchildren, met bin Laden during a desert horseback ride at the Pyramids of Giza. Their marriage in April created a firestorm as headlines screamed “the granny who married bin Laden’s son.”
Browne, from the Cheshire village of Moulton, was just another “dotty grandmother who sat on the parish council” before “falling madly in love” with Osama bin Laden’s fourth son. She says she was “embarrassingly smitten” and the fact that he was the son of the most hunted man in the world didn’t faze her, adding, quite naively it seems, “I truly believe that someone is innocent until proven guilty, so I wasn’t about to start judging his father.”
She scoffs at her critics who say she is just another naive, middle-aged British woman who has let herself be flattered by a young man with an eye on a cosy life in the UK.
“Look, he doesn’t need me to get a visa to come to England. All he needs to do is go to the British Embassy in Saudi. It’s ridiculous to say he is using me for that. London is full of Bin Ladens. Many of his uncles and aunts are here.”
She also rejects claims that there is something suspect about a handsome young man like Omar being interested in her.
“Why is it ok for a 50-year-old man to marry a 20-year-old woman, but when a woman wants to be with a younger man it’s seen as scandalous?”
The couple has applied for a visa to Britain. Meanwhile, they are planning their endurance horse race across North Africa, which they hope to start in March.
View photos of Jane Felix-Browne aka Zaina Alsabah and Omar Osama bin Laden below.