A HALF-BROTHER of Osama Bin Laden is lobbying investors to build a 17-mile bridge that would be the longest in the world, connecting the continents of Asia and Africa, in the hope that it will rehabilitate his family name.

Known as “the bridge of the century”, it would stretch between Yemen and Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. It would include a motorway and rail links, and two new luxury cities would be built on either side of the Red Sea.

Sheikh Tarek Mohammed Bin Laden, 60, has so far won backing and pledges of land from the presidents of both countries after shuttling between the capitals in his private jet to outline his plans in recent weeks.

Tarek shares the same father as the leader of Al-Qaeda, who is 10 years his junior, but they have different mothers. Mohammed, their late Yemen-born father, who emigrated to Saudi Arabia and founded a giant construction empire, is said to have had 22 wives and 55 children.

Bin Laden, described by a business colleague as “very intelligent, with a lot of charisma”, is reticent about his half-brother, saying only that he has had no contact with him and has no knowledge of his whereabouts. He runs the Saudi-based Bin Laden Group, a construction conglomerate which manages Mecca’s holy sites, among a host of other interests.

In an interview posted on the project’s website, he talked of his vision, saying the city to be built on the Djibouti coast and called Madinat al Noor (City of Light) would create 100,000 jobs and stretch over 375 square miles.

Spanning the strait of Bab el Mandeb (Gate of Tears), which owes its name to its perilous waters, the bridge would take nine years to build and would cost £10 billion.

Designs show a two-mile viaduct from the Yemeni coast to the island of Perim, where it passes for another two miles before a final 13-mile stretch to Ras Siyyan in Djibouti. This will have as its centrepiece an eight-mile suspension bridge towering above the sea. Up to 100,000 cars and 50,000 train passengers a day would be able to cross one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

For Bin Laden there is a matter of personal pride at stake. “One of the reasons Tarek is interested in the bridge project is that he wants to rehabilitate the name Bin Laden. But his involvement might be a problem for American investors,” a source close to the project admitted.

Bin Laden has, however, won a promise from the Noor City Development Corporation based in Napa Valley, California, to build the project.

The company’s chairman Tariq Ayyad, an American of Kuwaiti origin, said the bridge aimed to “ignite economic development”, creating jobs and generating trade from both sides of the Red Sea.

“It is very critical to connect African nations and their products and crops right to the Middle East. The Middle East is extremely wealthy in money and oil, but we lack quite a lot of crops and services,” Ayyad said.

The longest suspension bridge in the world at present is the 2.4mile Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, opened in 1998, which has a centre span of more than 1.2 miles.

The proposed bridge would be more than three times as long with a centre span - the most widely used means of measuring suspension bridges - of 3.1 miles, allowing even oil tankers to sail beneath.

The reward to find Osama Bin Laden, believed to be hiding in Pakistan, was doubled by the US Senate to $50m (£24.3m) this month. It may not tolerate his name being linked to one of the greatest engineering feats of the 21st century.

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