U.S. President Barack Obama announced Sunday night that al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden has been killed by U.S. military operation and is confirmed dead. The following is a brief introdution to bin Laden.

Al-Qaida leader bin Laden, a Saudi-born multimillionaire, was branded by Washington as the "prime suspect" behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States and wanted "dead or alive." Since then, he was seen as face of global terrorism.

Bin Laden, born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1957, is the 17th child of a Saudi construction tycoon whose family dominated housing and civil engineering in Saudi Arabia.

Bin Laden, educated in Jeddah as a civil engineer, was a giant in the construction sector in his own right. He has an estimated fortune of 400 million U.S. dollars.

He was reported to have at least three wives and more than 20 children.

Bin Laden worked for his father's company before joining in 1979 the US-backed Jihad, or "Holy War," against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, where he founded the "al-Qaeda" military base camp and training center in 1988.

He moved to Saudi Arabia after Soviet troops pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 and left in the following year for Yemen in disappointment as Saudi Arabia allowed U.S. troops in to attack Iraq in the Gulf War. He went to Sudan after the end of the Gulf War.

Stripped of Saudi citizenship for allegedly channeling fund for terrorism activities in 1994, bin Laden has since been living in Afghanistan. Pulling together several Islamic extremist organizations from different countries and regions, he turned the al-Qaida network into a nucleus in the campaign of driving Americans and Israelis out of Arab territories.

He was blamed by the United States for bomb attacks on U.S. barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in 1996, on American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and on a U.S. warship in Yemen in 2000. He was on the U.S. wanting list of terrorist in 1999 with a reward of 5-million dollars. Bin Laden denied involvement in any of the attacks.

The United States stormed bin Laden's al-Qaida network and its Taliban host in Afghanistan after locking bin Laden as the prime suspect for the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

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