Inside bin Laden's 'Perfect Match'

It can be difficult to meet exactly the right girl when you're the world's most notorious terrorist, but Osama bin Laden had the help of a Yemeni matchmaker when he decided it was time to find his final wife. Not that the al-Qaeda honcho wasn't demanding about who he wanted: "She must be pious, dutiful, young [preferably aged 16-18], well mannered, from a decent family, but above all patient," he told top aide Rashad Mohammed Saeed Ismael in charging him to find that special someone. "She will have to endure my exceptional circumstances."

Rashad knew the "perfect match," and soon 17-year-old Yemeni Amal Ahmed al-Sadah became bin Laden's fifth wife, he tells the Guardian in a look at the matchup. And when she became bin Laden's widow last week, he took the news "with happiness because we knew it was his aim to die as a martyr at the hands of the Americans," Rashad says. But "when a woman like Amal is widowed, it is a duty upon all Muslims to look after her. All the Yemeni people want her to come home." Click for more on bin Laden's wives. (More Osama bin Laden stories.)