BEIJING, Dec. 26 (Xinhuanet) -- Osama bin Laden's niece, in an interview with GQ magazine in which she appears scantily clad, says she has nothing in common with the al-Qaida leader and simply wants acceptance by Americans.

    Wafah Dufour, an aspiring New York-based musician, told the magazine that her family ties to the al Qaeda leader have prompted death threats and sent her into a bout of depression.

    "Everyone relates me to that man, and I have nothing to do with him," Wafah Dufour, the daughter of bin Laden's half brother, Yeslam Binladin, says in the January edition of the magazine.

    "I was born in the States and I want people to know I'm American, and I want people here to understand that I'm like anyone in New York. For me, it's home," said Dufour, who took her mother's name after the suicide hijacking attacks that destroyed Manhattan's World Trade Centre.

    Her mother, Carmen bin Laden, wrote the 2004 best-seller "Inside the Kingdom: My Life in Saudi Arabia," an account of her rocky marriage to Yeslama bin Laden, who amassed a fortune in the family's construction business and started his own investment firm.

    Dufour, who was born in Santa Monica, California and earned a master's degree in law from Columbia University, said she had never met Osama bin Laden.

    Dufour says she would not date a fundamentalist Muslim and that she cried hysterically when she witnessed the 9. 11 attacks on New York while staying with her mother in Geneva.

    (Agencies)

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