Witnesses said the family strife took its toll on the 54-year-old and he seemed to have aged beyond his years by the time of his death last May at the hands of US special forces.
There was also concern over his mental health and a kidney or stomach condition. The startling picture of bin Laden's life in the Abbottabad compound comes from Brigadier Shaukat Qadir, a retired Pakistani army officer who spent months researching last May's assassination.
From interview transcripts he found out that there was bad blood between Khairiah, who married bin Laden in the late 1980s, and his youngest wife, Amal Ahmed Abdel-Fatah al-Sada, because of the favouritism.