Based on new information provided by members of Bin Laden’s family, this book exposes for the first time the inside story of the world’s most-wanted terrorist from his childhood to the astounding, catastrophic act of terror in New York on 11 September 2001.

This first comprehensive insight into the life of the renegade prophet of the apocalypse reveals the roots of his discontent, detailing his privileged childhood riven by jealousies and family politics, and his youth laced with prostitutes, hedonism and lengthy periods of alcohol abuse. Fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, Osama then found "religion" and rapidly grew to be fundamentalist Islam's biggest star.

Behind the propaganda of a self-styled zealous freedom-fighter the book uncovers a man driven by the need for acceptance and adulation; one who deftly manipulated the institutions he claimed to despise in order to further his own terrible ends; who condemned depravity while keeping a hand in heroin trade and extortion.

Revelations include:

• The Saudi humiliation that finally drove him to his declaration of war on America in the name of Islam.

• How Osama built Al-Qaeda into a multinational terrorist organisation capable of wreaking havoc on a global scale.

• How Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda pulled off a series of international terrorist acts in 1990s — and some daring plans that were foiled.

• His several narrow escapes despite official U. S. sanction to kill him even before September 2001.

• The possibility that Bin Laden or Al-Qaeda possess nuclear and bio-weaponry.

Here is the full real-life story, a story which is truly stranger than fiction.