Monday, October 8, 2007

BBC: Kola Boof possibly married Bin laden

Sudanese Diplomat, Nadeem Quttub tells the BBC that
Kola Boof is a liar who was not raped and held against her
will--but was married to Bin Laden and happily carried his child.

THE BBC:

A Sudanese-American author, Kola Boof, claims she was kept against her will as a mistress for bin Laden during four months in 1996, in Marrakech, Morocco. Boof first denied the relationship, then later admitted to it, but claimed that it was after he initially raped her, then kept her a virtual prisoner. Later, in attempting to dispel skeptics' claims that the story was a hoax, Boof and her publicists noted that the bin Laden relationship event was backed up by Prince Fabrizio Ruspoli, an Italian who grew up in Tangiers, and who is owner of La Maison Arabe luxury hotel, which he refurbished over two years, and where bin Laden reputedly kept Boof in Marrakech. They also claim that FOX News fact-checked and verified the story. On August 23, 2003, Kola Boof appeared in an interview on the FOX News program "Big Story Weekend with Rita Cosby". More recently, Boof and her publicists claim to want to downplay the 1996 relationship, but the author did a two-part interview with MSNBC NEWS (see Youtube) in 2006 that only raised more questions.

The purported relationship with Boof first became public in October 2002, when it was revealed in the Spanish press by "a female columnist," who was later identified as a former roommate of Boof's, named Lourdes Harris. On October 24, 2002, the "Matthew Norman Diary" column item in the London newspaper The Guardian then quoted Kola Boof giving a response to the Spanish press reports: "A female columnist in Spain is telling people that I dated/had an affair with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s," she began. "That's bullshit. I hate to admit I met him, because it's akin to saying you know Hitler, but I barely knew Bin Laden from 1996-98. When we met in Marrakesh in 1996, I was a starlet and he was trying to screw every female in town." Later that month, The New York Times wrote an article about Boof, for which she declined to cooperate, because of the perceived negative angle. In reality, the New York Times helped cooberate Boof's story by posting a captioned movie still from an Egyptian film that featured her.

Nadeem Quttub, a former diplomat of the Sudanese government who helped bin Laden build roads in Sudan, told the BBC that Kola Boof was with Bin Laden "willingly" and miscarried their child in May 1996. Quttub says that Kola Boof accepted marriage with Bin Laden, re-converted to Islam and was very happy with the terrorist, but is now trying to save her reputation in the west with "fantastical stories of rape and imprisonment".

In her 2006 autobiography (as excerpted in Harper's Magazine, September 2006, pp. 22-24), Boof describes bin Laden as obsessed with Whitney Houston, smoking lots of marijuana, and forcing her to dance naked to Van Halen. Peter Bergen, a biographer of Bin Laden, has called Boof "delusional". He says that Osama Bin Laden was never in Morocco in 1996 - in fact, he says that Bin Laden has never been to Morocco at all. His comments, however, were later torpedoed when other experts pointed out misinformation Bergen published about Boof's autobiography concerning the imprisonment of Bin Laden's right hand man, Al Zawahiri, and it turned out that information from Kola Boof's autobiography was more accurate than Peter Bergen's.

During her first book reading in New York City at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, Boof avoided any talk of Bin Laden and focused her energies on the issues of "black women", singing Arabic songs about the plight of black women worldwide.

Though Boof is trying to re-invent herself and distance herself from the Bin Laden chapter in her life, Sudanese diplomat Nadeem Quttub says that Boof is a "liar" and a "prostitute" who can not be trusted and that by the fate of Allah she will someday pay for the shame that she has brought against the Arab world and her Egyptian father's name.