Fact Check: Was Osama bin Laden's Family Plagued by Plane Accidents?

It's been 13 years since Al-Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy Seals in a compound in northern Pakistan.

The mass murderer, whose actions led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, spent nearly 10 years on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list before he was tracked down and killed on May 2, 2011.

A post on social media this week said that 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 misjudged landing. His half brother died in Texas in 1988 after piloting his aircraft into power lines. 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 taken in 1977.

The Facts

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

Mohammed bin Laden, Osama's father, died in 1967 in Saudi Arabia's southern desert. 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 ex–Royal Air Force pilot who flew the plane, the father would be married to no more than four wives at a time, divorcing his older wives and marrying new ones.

Osama was the 17th of 52 children sired by Mohammed, Saudi Arabia's wealthiest construction magnate and a close friend of the Saudi royal family. When he was 3, 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 42, in what was described by bin Laden biographer Steve Coll as a "freak ultralight accident" outside San Antonio in May 1988. Salem, who was the family's eldest member at the time of his father's death in 1967, took control of the family businesses after Mohammed died.

The ultralight sport aircraft he was in flew directly into power lines, titled forward and crashed into the ground, according to a report by the website My San Antonio.

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, were killed 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 U.K., said the aircraft had received multiple collision alerts and was flying "significantly higher and faster than normal for a visual approach."

"The aircraft floated before touching down and overran the runway end. It collided with an earth bank, and then cars in a car park, causing the wing to separate and a fire to start," the report said. "The four occupants were fatally injured."

The report went on: "Several factors combined to create a very high workload for the pilot. This may have saturated his mental capacity, impeding his ability to handle new information and adapt his mental model, leading him to become fixated on continuing the approach."

A 2002 New York Times report said the bin Laden family disowned Osama in 1994, when the 9/11 mastermind had his Saudi Arabian citizenship stripped because of his extremism. The bin Ladens remain a powerful Saudi family, with close ties to the country's royalty.

The Ruling

True

In a strange coincidence, Osama bin Laden's father Mohammed, half brother Salem, stepmother Bashir and her 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 Check team