With more than 170 million album and single sales worldwide, deceased pop legend Whitney Houston -- who died Saturday in her Beverly Hills hotel room at the age of 48 -- had more than a few fans. So it shouldn't be surprising that there would be a few bad apples in the bunch.
Such as, oh, terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.
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Somehow lost in the nonstop Whitney Houston coverage since her demise is the fact that bin Laden was a rabid follower of the "I Will Always Love You" songbird -- at least according to poet and activist Kola Boof, who reportedly lived with the 9/11 orchestrator for several months on a Moroccan estate in 1996.
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In her memoir "Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof" -- which was excerpted by Harper's Bazaar in 2006 -- Boof recalls Bin Laden's fervor for Houston.
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"He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar," Boof wrote. "It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his colour rule and make her one of his wives."
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Of course, Houston was already married, to Bobby Brown, but bin Laden had a plan to take care of that, too -- he would simply have Brown rubbed out.
"Whitney Houston's name was the one that would be mention constantly. How beautiful she was, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and by her husband Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed," Boof revealed.
Art one point, bin Laden went into a rage about Boof's braided hair, because -- yep -- Whitney Houston would never wear her locks like that.
"Osama said only monkeys braid their hair. He told me that the singer Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and that she never wore her hair braided," Poof recalled. "'I want you to fix your hair like hers from now on,' he said. 'I can't put my fingers through it when it's braided.'”
Houston was found submerged in the bathtub of her Beverly Hilton hotel room by a member of her personal staff at approximately 3:30 p.m.
