Mohammed bin Laden

Biography

In 1930, a powerfully built dockside laborer, six feet tall and with one eye, decided there was more to life than loading ships in the ports of his poverty-stricken native province of Hadramaut in Yemen. He packed a bag, bought a place on a camel caravan heading to the newly created kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and set off on a thousand-mile trek to seek his fortune.

The man, who would go on to father a terrorist sought by the military might of the Western world, got his first job as a bricklayer with Aramco -- the Arabian-American oil company -- earning a single Saudi riyal, about 15 cents, a day. He lived frugally, saved hard, invested well and went into business himself.

By the early 1950s, Mohammed bin Laden was employed in building palaces for the House of Saud in Riyadh. He won the contracts by heavily undercutting local firms. It was a gamble that paid off. Bin Laden's big break came when a foreign contractor withdrew from a deal to build the Medina-Jedda highway and he took on the job. By the early 1960s he was a rich man -- and an extraordinary one.

"He couldn't read or write and signed his name with a cross all his life, but he had an extraordinary intelligence," said a French engineer who worked with him in the '60s. The engineer remembered that the former laborer never forgot his roots, always leaving home "with a wad of notes to give to the poor."

Such alms-giving is one of the fundamentals of Islam. Bin Laden senior was a devout man, raised in the strict and conservative Wahhabi strand of Sunni Islam. Later he was to boast that, using his private helicopter, he could pray in the three holiest locations of Islam -- Mecca, Medina and the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem -- in a single day.

Visiting the former two sites must have been especially satisfying, for it was the contract to restore and expand the facilities serving pilgrims and worshippers there that established the reputation of his company, confirmed its status as the in-house builders of the Saudi ruling clan and made him stupendously wealthy. Though at one stage he was rich enough to bail out the royal family when they fell on hard times, the tatty bag he had carried when he left Yemen remained on display in the palatial family home. He was killed when his helicopter crashed in 1968.

Mohammed bin Laden had, in the words of the French engineer, "changed wives like you or I change cars." He had three Saudi wives, Wahhabis like their husband, who were more or less permanent. The fourth, however, was changed on a regular basis.

The magnate would send his private pilot all over the Middle East to pick up yet another bride. "Some were as young as 15 and were completely covered from head to toe," the pilot's widow recently recalled. "But they were all exceptionally beautiful."