He is one of 11 sons of the world’s most notorious terrorist. Omar, 43, is the eldest of Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 attacks, which left nearly 3,000 dead in the United States in 2001. Since 2016, the forty-year-old had made his mark in France, in the small medieval town of Domfront-en-Poiraie. The Norman bocages of Orne perhaps inspired the man who discovered painting during the first confinement, and regularly sold his paintings at local fairs.
But Omar Bin Laden’s Norman tranquility ended in October 2023, when he was forced to leave France after being targeted by an expulsion measure from the territory, with withdrawal of his residence permit and a ban on return. in France for two years. The reason for this expulsion? Omar Bin Laden had “welcomed comments on his social networks in 2023 that were an apology for terrorism,” wrote Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau this Tuesday on X.
And to specify that the appeal filed by Bin Laden was rejected last Friday by the French courts, which “confirmed the legality of this decision taken for national security”. The boss of Beauvau announces that he has issued this Tuesday an “administrative ban on the territory”, which “guarantees the impossibility” of a return to France, “for any reason whatsoever. »
However, after a childhood full of prohibitions, spent in jihadist camps in Sudan or Afghanistan, Omar Bin Laden seemed to have cut ties with his father, but without ever truly condemning his legacy. According to the plot of his story, which he perhaps deliberately keeps mysterious, the son fled the family property in the Afghan mountains a few months before the attacks, according to a long interview given to Rolling Stones magazine in 2010. Yet it was he who his father had chosen as his successor to lead Al-Qaeda and lead global jihad, he assured then.
Still according to his story, Omar Bin Laden found refuge in Saudi Arabia where he said he earned his living as a scrap dealer, then tried to make a living elsewhere. But Egypt, where he met his wife in 2006, Great Britain and then Spain refused to welcome them.
“My father will be my father until I die”
In this interview with the British magazine, conducted a little less than a year before Osama Bin Laden was killed by American special forces in Abbottabad, where he was hiding in Pakistan, Omar talks about his paternal love: “I love him because he’s my father. I don’t want him to be caught and tried. It would break my heart. My father will be my father until I die.” Far from rejecting him, Omar Bin Laden, with the same features and same black eyes, also apparently cultivates his megalomania.
Omar dreams of being a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations, imagines the couple he forms with Zaina, his British wife, much more famous than Charles and Lady Diana. In 2013, while living in Qatar, he tried to make a name for himself at the head of a construction company. At the time, he promised a turnover of 800 million euros, according to his statements to L’Express. Then nothing more.
In 2016, it is therefore in Domfront-en-Poiraie, in Orne, that we find Bin Laden’s heir. In Ouest-France in 2021, the person said he could “live there far from the violence of his past”. In France, the couple had “found love and kindness”, he confided to the regional daily.
Omar Bin Laden clearly continued to cultivate his dreams of grandeur: “I think I will be a famous painter. Perhaps more than Van Gogh,” he assured in this interview while presenting his paintings, signed OBM. Since his expulsion, he has found refuge in Qatar.
