Bin Laden's neice strips down for GQ

Associated Press | December 23, 2005

NEW YORK (AP) -- Osama bin Laden's niece, in an interview with GQ magazine in which she appears scantily clad, says she has nothing in common with the al Qaeda leader and simply wants acceptance by Americans.

"Everyone relates me to that man, and I have nothing to do with him," Wafah Dufour, the daughter of bin Laden's half brother, Yeslam Binladin, says in the January edition of the magazine, referring to the al Qaeda leader.

"I want to be accepted here, but I feel that everybody's judging me and rejecting me," said the California-born Dufour, a law graduate who lives in New York. "Come on, where's the American spirit? Accept me. I want to be embraced, because my values are like yours. And I'm here. I'm not hiding."

Dufour, who adopted her mother's maiden name after the September 11, 2001, attacks that have been blamed on bin Laden, appears in several provocative photos in the magazine.

In one, she is sprawled on a bed wearing lingerie and a feather boa. In another, she appears in a bubble bath-filled tub.

The pictures are likely to be considered obscene by conservative Muslims in and outside of Saudi Arabia where women are required to be veiled.

Yeslam and Osama are among 54 children of the late Saudi construction magnate Mohammed bin Laden and his 22 wives. The extended family includes several hundred people.

Binladin, who received Swiss citizenship in 2001, has condemned his half brother "for his acts and his convictions." He intentionally spells his name differently from his half brother.

In the interview, Dufour says she would not date a fundamentalist Muslim and that she cried hysterically when she witnessed the attacks on New York while staying with her mother, Carmen Dufour, in Geneva, Switzerland.