Was Osama bin Laden’s family hit by plane accidents?

It has been 13 years since al-Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was killed by US Navy Seals at a compound in northern Pakistan.

The mass murderer, whose actions resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, was on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list for nearly a decade before he was tracked down and killed in May 2, 2011.

A social media post this week said several members of his wealthy family were killed in a series of plane crashes both before and after the al-Qaeda founder’s death.

The claim

A Wednesday post on Reddit, which has been upvoted more than a thousand times, said: “Osama bin Laden’s billionaire father died in a plane crash in 1967 due to a bad landing. His half-brother died in Texas in 1988 after flying his plane into it.” In 2015, his half-sister and stepmother also died in a plane crash in Hampshire, England.

The post was tagged “conspiracy” and included a photo of bin Laden from 1977.

The facts

Although it may seem like an unlikely coincidence, this claim is true.

Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s father, died in 1967 in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia. His plane, a Twin Beechcraft, crashed near Abha, Saudi Arabia, as he was on his way to marry his 23rd wife. According to a biography of the former Royal Air Force pilot who flew the plane, the father was married to no more than four women at a time, divorcing his older wives and marrying new ones.

Osama was the 17th of 52 children of Mohammed, Saudi Arabia’s richest construction magnate and close friend of the Saudi royal family. When he was three years old, Osama’s mother divorced Mohammed and the boy was raised by his mother’s second husband in Saudi Arabia.

His half-brother Salem died at the age of 42 in May 1988 in what bin Laden biographer Steve Coll called an “unusual microlight accident” outside San Antonio. Salem was the oldest member of the family at the time of his father’s death in 1967, taking control of the family businesses after Mohammed’s death.

According to a report from the website My San Antonio, the ultralight sport aircraft he was in flew directly into power lines, tilted forward and crashed into the ground.

In July 2015, four years after Osama’s death, his stepmother Bashir Hashem, 75; her daughter Sana bin Laden, 53; and another relative, Zouheir Anuar Hashem, 56, died in a private jet crash at Blackbushe Airport in Surrey, England.

A report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, which investigates civil aircraft accidents and serious incidents in the United Kingdom, said the plane received multiple collision warnings and was flying “significantly higher and faster than normal for a visual approach.”

“The aircraft hovered before landing and overran the end of the runway. It collided with an earth bank and then with cars in a parking lot, causing the wing to detach and a fire to break out,” the report said. “The four occupants were fatally injured.”

The report continued: “Several factors combined to result in a very high workload for the pilot. This may have taxed his mental capacity, impaired his ability to deal with new information and adjust his mental model, causing him to become fixated on continuing the approach.”

A 2002 New York Times The bin Laden family reportedly disowned Osama in 1994 when the 9/11 mastermind was stripped of his Saudi citizenship because of his extremism. The bin Ladens remain a powerful Saudi family with close ties to the country’s royal family.

The regulation

TRUE

By a strange coincidence, Osama bin Laden’s father Mohammed, half-brother Salem, stepmother Bashir and their daughter Sana, and another relative, Zouheir, died in a series of plane crashes, as described in the Reddit post.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s fact checking team