Exclusive Interview: Bin Laden's Sister-in-Law

Oct. 24 -- The first time Carmen bin Laden met her brother-in-law Osama, he turned his back on her.

"Somebody knocked at the door. Instinctively I opened the door and here was that man. I just got a glance at him, and he turned his back because I was unveiled and he didn't want to see me," recalls Carmen, who married one of Osama's 23 brothers, Yeslam.

This occurred in the mid-1970s, years before bin Laden would go to Afghanistan to help the mujahideen fight off the Soviet invaders — and establish what would later become the terrorist network al Qaeda.

"I knew he was religious because he was the only brother who would refuse to see me," Carmen says in an exclusive interview airing on Primetime Thursday. "This was how Osama was at that time."

Swiss-born Carmen married Yeslam in Saudi Arabia in 1974. They spent a few years in Los Angeles, moved back to Saudi Arabia, and by the mid-1980s, Carmen became estranged from her husband, moving to Europe with their three children. She says she has not had contact with the bin Laden family in 11 years.

Carmen tells ABCNEWS' Diane Sawyer that having the bin Laden name has become a "terrible" burden. She describes herself and her children as "ordinary people caught in an extraordinary situation."

A former student at the University of Southern California, Carmen condemns the Sept. 11 attacks, saying they left her feeling "like they hurt my country."

She adds: "In my head I said, 'The freedom is gone. What made America different is gone.'"

When she first heard accusations that Osama might have orchestrated the attacks, the possibility took a while to sink in. "It's such a huge thing that you don't believe people would do such things. Then I realized, yeah, it could be."

Carmen says she does not hate her husband's brother: "I don't like him ... I cannot hate somebody. Hate, for me, it's a terrible thing. He hates people and look what he has become."

She adds: "I think in a very personal way, who is he to tell me what I have to think? ... I am afraid that Osama or the like of him want to tell people how to live, what is the vision of Islam."