Family members called Salem’s friends and relatives in Europe to say that if they wished to attend the burial and mourning services, they could converge on Geneva, where the Bin Mahfouz plane would make a stopover. When the 707 lumbered into the airport’s private aviation terminal above Lake Geneva, Yeslam was waiting, along with Shafiq, another half-brother who spent most of his time in Europe. Baby Elephant and several of Salem’s other friends and relatives were there, too.2
Yeslam found himself gripped by paralyzing anxiety; he became so concerned about the prospect of flying with Salem’s coffin that he was unable to walk up the jet’s stairs. His siblings tried to comfort him, but he was stricken. When the plane finally rolled away, Yeslam remained behind.3
Ali, Salem’s estranged former rival for family leadership, and once a favorite of their father, flew to Saudi Arabia on his own private jet to pay his respects. From Jeddah, a group of relatives and friends drove to Medina to await the arrival of Salem’s body. A burial permit for Medina, where the Prophet Mohamed had also been laid to rest, required royal approval, which Fahd’s office readily provided. The group waiting at Medina’s VIP terminal called up to the air traffic control tower for word about the 707’s arrival time, just as they had always done when Salem’s private flights were due. They went outside to watch the landing. Salem often kept his friends waiting for hours, and when his jet would finally appear on the horizon, he often teased them with a touch-and-go—he descended until his wheels touched the runway, then pulled up, flew off, circled around, and landed on the second try. That night, his friends watched in astonishment as the Bin Mahfouz plane badly overshot the runway; the pilot had no choice but to pull up, fly around, and land again. The pilot later said it had been a genuine if rare error on his part; Salem’s entourage agreed that their friend’s spirit had awoken long enough to play one last practical joke on them.
They loaded the coffin into a General Motors Corporation ambulance. The full-bearded Mahrouz was among the brothers who climbed inside; he chanted a prayer for the dead. One of Salem’s friends recalled being hoisted into the ambulance by the Bin Laden brothers, so that he could sit beside the coffin. “You haven’t left him throughout his life,” one of the brothers said. “You’re not going to leave him now.”4
They washed the body at Mohamed Bin Laden’s former Medina home. In a gesture of respect, one of the brothers handed Khalid Bin Mahfouz the key to Salem’s coffin, so that he could initiate the washing. Afterward they wrapped his body in a shroud of green cloth, the color of dress in Paradise. The only sounds were of grief and prayer.5
At the graveyard, in the darkness, mourners in flowing white robes and headdresses swelled and jostled. The outstretched arms of his brothers and friends carried Salem above shoulder height to a sandy ditch. As he was laid in, a man shouted and approached with the shrouded corpse of a very young girl; it was not clear who she was, or how she had died, but she had been chosen to lie in Salem’s grave at his feet, to keep him company—her soul was pure and innocent, and would comfort and protect his in the passage to afterlife.6
Osama was among the brothers who attended Salem’s funeral. It is not clear when he arrived. He continued to travel back and forth from Afghanistan, and it is possible that he was in the kingdom at the time of Salem’s death; the Ramadan holiday, a time when the Bin Ladens often gathered together in Saudi Arabia, had ended only recently. If he was present at the burial, he would have joined Mahrouz in the rigorous prayers that believing Wahhabis offer the dead. He was certainly present through the mourning receptions that followed during the next three days. He felt closer to Salem than to any of his other brothers, according to Osama’s mother, even though they lived by such different creeds. He had regarded Salem “like a father,” she said later. “Salem’s death saddened Osama a great deal.”7
In later years, as he held forth loquaciously about America’s alleged crimes against Islam, Osama never spoke about Salem’s death on American soil, just as he never spoke about the airplane crash caused by an American pilot that had claimed his father’s life. Did he consider the possibility of conspiracies? In Arabia, it would be far more exceptional if he did not. The available evidence about Osama’s specific reaction to Salem’s accident, however, is virtually nonexistent. His half-brother Ghalib, who visited Osama at least once near the Afghan border, did consider the possibility that a hidden plot might lie behind Salem’s death. Later that summer, Ghalib flew to Texas to inspect the Kitty Hawk Field of Dreams. He obtained a copy of the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s autopsy report, according to a family business partner. The report found that Salem had no heart disease at the time of his death and had no trace of drugs, alcohol, or other intoxicants in his bloodstream. By the partner’s account, Ghalib was relieved at these discoveries, and seemed willing to accept the autopsy’s formal conclusion, which read, “Manner of Death: Accident.” Jamal Khashoggi, who spoke regularly with Osama during this period, and who shared his Muslim Brotherhood–influenced outlook at the time, said that while he was certain Salem’s sudden death “was a big event in his life,” Osama never discussed it. Nor, according to the publicly available record, did he discuss it with other friends or journalists.8
In Jeddah, as they had two decades earlier after their father’s passing, the sons of Mohamed Bin Laden gathered at the family compound, between the evening mahgrib and isha prayers, for formal ceremonies of condolence. Thousands of mourners flocked to the home Mohamed had built for Salem’s mother at Kilo 7 on the Mecca Road, near the headquarters of the family’s main construction company.
This time, however, the receptions had a secondary purpose—many of those who had been close to Salem now shuffled forward to swear bayah, or fealty, to Bakr Bin Laden as the new head of the Bin Laden family. This ritual was a direct and self-conscious echo of the bayah ceremonies in Riyadh that followed the death of a Saudi king. (At the Al-Saud court, the ascending king sits in mourning and receives a line of visitors who demonstrate their loyalty and respect by kissing his shoulder, hand, or cheek.) That it would be Bakr, and not another brother, who received these gestures of obedience was a decision that had accumulated gradually within the Bin Laden family over a period of years. Salem had increasingly designated Bakr as chief of business operations, and Bakr’s central role in the Mecca and Medina renovations put him in the lead of the family’s two most lucrative and politically sensitive construction contracts. He was not the oldest living son after Salem, but he was among the most senior, and by virtue of his civil engineering degree, also among the most qualified. He was, in addition, Salem’s full brother, the guardian of his estate and his legacy, the eldest surviving son of a senior and respected widow of Mohamed. All this made him the natural choice. There is no evidence that Bakr’s anointment required any debate or deliberation within the family; it seems, rather, to have been taken more or less for granted.
Heavily pregnant, Salem’s widow, Carrie, grieved in the company of hundreds of Saudi women at the separate but parallel female condolence receptions. She staggered through the days, and on June 15, less than three weeks after Salem’s accident, she gave birth in Jeddah to a daughter, Sama.9 More than five years earlier, Carrie had converted to Islam, fulfilling a promise she made to Salem while a passenger in his glider, which she thought was about to crash. Over the years, her decision secured her acceptance by the larger Bin Laden family. She took her new faith seriously. After her daughter’s birth, Carrie decided to embrace rather than recoil from her unexpected position as a Bin Laden widow—and she agreed to accept the Arabian and Islamic traditions this position carried.