DOHA (News Agencies) - Osama bin Laden beamed with pride at his son's wedding in Afghanistan on Arab satellite TV Wednesday.
Qatar's Al-Jazeera channel said Afghan officials and Arab Islamist activists attended Ahmad bin Laden's wedding Tuesday in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.
Ahmad married the daughter of Egyptian Abu Hafs al-Masri, bin Laden's right-hand man, in a simple ceremony. Both husband and wife were born in Pakistan at a time when their parents fought the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The father, in white Arab headdress, and son were seated next to each other on carpets and smiling as they embraced well-wishers in the footage.
Among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a close bin Laden aide and head of the Egyptian Islamic group Al-Jihad, which was linked by the Egyptian government to the October 1981 assassination of president Anwar Sadat.
The televised wedding underlined the refusal of the Taliban militia, which rules most of Afghanistan, to hand bin Laden over to the United States, where he is wanted for 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa that cost more than 220 lives.
The Saudi-born millionaire is also suspected by the U.S. of involvement in the October 12th bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in which 17 American sailors died.
