Noor bin Laden now doubts her uncle Osama was behind 9/11

Osama bin Laden’s Swiss-born niece championed Donald Trump in 2020. In three essays this summer she has criticised his second term, said her surname was why she was given a platform, and questioned whether her uncle was involved in the attacks at all

Noor bin Laden, a niece of Osama bin Laden, says she no longer knows whether he was involved in 9/11. She made the claim in an essay posted on her Substack on 11 September, the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

“I have no idea at what level he might have been involved with 9/11, or even if he was involved at all,” she wrote. If he was, “he clearly had help from high places.” She says she has no inside information about her uncle, and the essay offers no new evidence. Osama bin Laden took responsibility for the attacks in a videotape broadcast in 2004.

The 39-year-old was born in Geneva, the youngest daughter of Yeslam bin Ladin, one of Osama’s older half-brothers. Her branch of the family spells the surname Bin Ladin. In her first interview, with the New York Post in September 2020, she said another 9/11-style attack could follow if Joe Biden beat Donald Trump.

The anniversary piece is her third essay since July. The first two criticised Trump’s second term and reconsidered her own public support for him in 2020.

What she wrote on the anniversary

Bin Ladin was 14 in September 2001. The essay opens with her in front of the television, crying as the towers burned and saying aloud that “New York will never be the same again”. After her parents’ “acrimonious divorce”, she grew up cut off from her father’s family in Saudi Arabia. She writes that she did not know then that Osama bin Laden’s role in the attacks “is often questioned” in the Middle East.

“Back in Switzerland, I accepted the official narrative, believing it was simply my fate to bear the stigma of my notorious last name.”

In 2008, while she was a student at the University of Geneva, a flyer led her to a talk by Richard Gage, an American architect who argues that the Twin Towers were brought down by controlled demolition. She sat near the aisle so she could slip out, then stayed to the end. Some of his arguments struck her as “seemingly irrefutable”, she writes, “but I just couldn’t go there yet.”

She came back to the subject almost ten years later, as she approached 30, around the time of Trump’s first presidential campaign. She “binge-watched” 9/11 truther videos, including those of Alex Jones, and now says the US government “knows a lot more about what happened than what they’re telling us”. The plot, she writes, “seems way beyond” the abilities of “the alleged culprits”, though she says she has no names to give.

The essay presents the attacks as part of a long-running effort, by people she does not identify, to take away Americans’ freedoms. “9/11 was their booster shot,” she writes. Five years ago, marking the 20th anniversary, she wrote that “our rulers exploited this tragedy” but did not question who carried it out.

The new essay also turns on her mother, the Swiss author Carmen Dufour, who wrote about her marriage into the bin Laden family in Inside the Kingdom, published in 2004 under the name Carmen Bin Ladin. “I was heavily influenced by my mother’s zealous (but erroneous) convictions, promoted in her sensationalist New York Times-bestselling book,” Bin Ladin writes. In October 2020 she spoke about the book very differently. In a YouTube interview with the academic Gad Saad, she read passages from it aloud and said her mother had known it was Osama as soon as the second plane hit. We found no public response to the essay from her mother or her sisters.

The next day Bin Ladin thanked Gage by name on X. Gage founded Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in 2006, and its board removed him as chief executive in 2021 after comments he made about Covid-19. In another post that day, Bin Ladin wrote: “Never underestimate intel agencies’ ability to plant an evidence trail ahead of time, in preparation of future events/ops.” She did not say which agencies or events she meant.

Three essays since July

When Trump won in November 2024, Bin Ladin posted on X: “Tonight, Americans reclaimed what is rightfully theirs: their nation.” By 4 July this year she was writing that his administration had made “many moves contrary to their campaign promises”.

In the July essay she says alarm bells first rang for her after the Butler shooting in 2024 and Trump’s “immediate selection of J.D. Vance” as his running mate. She links the Stargate AI project, which he announced in January 2025, to “a technocratic, surveillance dystopian nightmare of a future”. She still counts herself part of the America First movement, writing that its supporters “were never basic ‘fans’ blinded by their leader”.

In August she wrote that her motives in 2020 were sincere, but that she had been naive to believe “the system could be hacked by a left field candidate”. She added: “I was given a platform due to my name because it was useful to them.” With the anniversary approaching, she wrote, she was going back over 9/11 material she had watched years before. The essay about her uncle came 16 days later.

What the record shows

In the 2004 tape, aired by Al Jazeera on 29 October, bin Laden said, in NBC News’ translation: “We decided to destroy towers in America so they may taste what we have tasted.” The 9/11 Commission’s report that year named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the plot’s “principal architect” and found that bin Laden approved it. The attacks killed 2,977 people, not counting the 19 hijackers.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology investigated the collapses. Its 2005 report on the Twin Towers found that the plane impacts and the fires that followed weakened the floors and columns until the buildings fell. NIST said it found “no corroborating evidence” that explosives brought the towers down. A 2008 report found that fires caused the collapse of 7 World Trade Center, a 47-storey building that fell late that afternoon, and ruled out explosives there too. NIST’s findings are accepted by structural engineering researchers.

Only one person has been convicted in a US court over the plot: Zacarias Moussaoui, sentenced to life in 2006 after pleading guilty. The men accused of planning the attacks have never been tried. A military judge has set the trial of Mohammed and three co-defendants for 5 June 2028, Newsweek reported last month.

Who is Noor bin Laden?

Bin Ladin grew up in Geneva with her mother and two older sisters, Wafah and Najia. Her parents separated in 1988, when she was a baby. The New York Post reported in 2020 that her father had played no role in her life. She says she has never been to Saudi Arabia and has never met her uncle. Wafah, a singer, uses their mother’s maiden name, Dufour.

Much of the bin Laden family’s fortune comes from the Saudi Binladin Group, the construction company founded by Osama’s father. Speaking to Saad in 2020, Noor said she had given up any financial ties to her father’s family. No reliable figure for her own wealth has been published.

After the Post interview she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in October 2020. In June 2021, the day before Joe Biden met Vladimir Putin in Geneva, she waved a “Trump Won” flag from a boat on Lake Geneva. The following month she made her first appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room, which later billed her as a correspondent, and she has reported for the show from the World Economic Forum in Davos.

She has kept the family name throughout. In 2020 she told the Post she was often held in interrogation rooms at New York’s JFK and Boston’s Logan airports, sometimes for hours. “Considering my name, I always felt it was normal and that they were doing their job,” she said. “It is the name I was born with and it is the name on my passport.”