Lay off my British wife says son of Bin Laden

But Omar Bin Laden, 27, cannot understand why such a fuss is being made over his decision to marry a 51-year- old granny from Cheshire.

He announced yesterday that he was 'stunned and outraged' at criticism of his wedding to five times divorced Jane Felix-Browne.

Scroll down for more...

The couple, who met while horse riding near Egypt's Great Pyramid, held marriage ceremonies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt but are currently living apart.

However Miss Felix-Browne has said she would like him to come to live in Britain - which might be difficult in the light of his family connections.

Mr Bin Laden, fourth of the Al Qaeda leader's 18 sons, lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Scroll dwon for more...

He issued a statement to a Saudi newspaper yesterday in which he defended his marriage to the woman he knows as Zaina Bint Mohamad Al-Sabah. He said she was a Muslim and of partly Kuwaiti descent. "Her nationality is not an issue. What is important is her religion and manner," he said.

Mr Bin Laden said his current wife had no problem with the new addition to the family.

"Yes, I am married to a Saudi woman from an honorable Arab family and I live a happy life with her," he said.

"She has agreed to my (second) marriage. Polygamy is not strange in our Arab and Islamic society" he said.

Citing an example from the life of Islam's Prophet Muhammad and his first wife, Omar bin Laden said the age difference with his new spouse was not an issue.

"The Prophet had married Khadija, the mother of the faithful, when he was twenty and she was forty," he pointed out.

Miss Felix-Browne who also uses the name Zainah Mohamad Al-Sabah, was born Paula Joy Hanson in the Lancashire cotton town of Radcliffe in 1955.

The grandmother of five, has reportedly said her three sons - Dave, 33, Vincent, 28, and Dean, 27, had met Omar and approve of their relationship.

Previous husbands of the 51-year-old, whose body is covered in large tatoos of the black widow spider, have included an RAC patrol man and a Hell's Angel.

Miss Felix-Browne, a parish councillor in Moulton, Cheshire is currently understood to be staying in Egypt.

She said she was hoping to arrange a visa for her new husband to visit Britain, but accepts it may prove difficult because of his family name.

Felix-Browne said her husband, a scrap dealer and one of 18 brothers, was raised in Sudan and Afghanistan after his father left Saudi Arabia.

The father and son last met in Afghanistan in 2000, the year before the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Omar was training to be a soldier in Afghanistan at the age of 19, when he left his father 'because he wanted to see the world and didn't want to fight and die young,' she said.

Osama bin Laden had moved from Saudi Arabia to Sudan during the 1990-91 Gulf War, after failing to dissuade the Saudi government from turning to the U.S. for military help.

He was stripped of his Saudi citizenship after continuing to criticize Riyadh's alliance to the U.S., and moved to Afghanistan after being forced to leave Sudan in 1996.