Monday October 8, 2001

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - A half brother of Osama bin Laden who remained in Boston after the Sept. 11 attacks says he lives in fear he will be blamed for the terrorist acts, which he condemns.

Abdullah Mohammed Binladin, 35, stayed behind when 11 members of his family boarded a chartered jet for Saudi Arabia.

But since Sept. 11, he has stopped using credit cards, stopped jogging along the Charles River and avoids strangers who might hear his name and become upset. He has also suspended his hobby of flying single-engine planes, fearing the reaction he might get.

"Our name is being hijacked," he told the Boston Sunday Globe.

Binladin, who says most of the family uses that spelling, is one of 54 children born to wives of the late Mohammed Bin-Awad Binladin. The family disowned Osama bin Laden in 1994, and Binladin says they have no connections with him.

"In the early 1990s, the family repeatedly reached out and made attempts to plead with Osama to moderate his views," Binladin said. "After these attempts failed, there was a reluctant but unanimous consent that Osama should be disowned."

Binladin learned of the terrorist attacks while buying coffee and watched on television as the second plane crash into the World Trade Center. Soon after, Osama bin Laden was being named the prime suspect.

"I felt sad, that this is a tragedy for humanity," he said. "And I felt, this is a tragedy for our family. How will people look at our family?"

Binladin moved to the Boston area in the 1990s to study at Harvard Law School, earning a doctorate.

His father, originally from the Hadramaut region of Yemen, had no formal education. In the 1950s, he designed and built the al-Hada road, making it easier for Muslims to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia. He gained the trust of King Faisal and was granted the contract to rebuild the mosques in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Later, in a move said to have finalized the split between Osama bin Laden and the rest of the family, the company built military support facilities for the United States during the Gulf War, said Charles Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

Binladin last saw Osama bin Laden at the funeral of their oldest brother, Salem, who died in a plane crash in 1988.

"He had been living most of the time in Afghanistan," Abdullah recalled. "I personally didn't know him very well."