Posted on 11/30/2005 5:33:22 PM PST by blam
Militants linked to woman suicide bomber held in raids
By David Rennie in Brussels
(Filed: 01/12/2005)
Police in Belgium and France yesterday arrested 15 suspected militants believed to be linked to a Belgian woman who carried out a suicide bombing in Iraq last month.
The 38-year-old convert to Islam blew herself up on Nov 9 on the outskirts of Baghdad in what security sources believe was the first suicide attack involving a European woman.
More than 200 heavily-armed officers raided addresses in Brussels and three other Belgian cities in the early hours of the morning. They arrested 14 people in an attempt to shut down the suspected network which smuggled the unnamed woman into Iraq.
The Belgian federal prosecutor's office said that two Tunisians and three Moroccans were among those arrested, while police also seized documents.
The fifteenth suspect, a Tunisian, was arrested near Paris.
The man, who was not previously known to police, was taken into custody because he knew the husband of the suicide bomber.
The husband, a Moroccan, is also believed to have died in Iraq, reportedly after being shot by American soldiers.
All those arrested were said by officials to be closely connected to the woman, a former drug addict and divorcee from the run-down French-speaking city of Charleroi.
The network had been under surveillance for four months after Belgium received intelligence about a suspected terror cell, but the country's small and overstretched security services failed to detect the woman leaving the country, officials admitted. Glenn Audernaert, a senior police official, said: "It was through this organisation that the lady went to Iraq with her husband, but we only knew about her presence … once she was already there."
She is thought to have been taken to Iraq overland via Turkey by her husband, a Muslim extremist.
Her suicide mission targeted an American military convoy but she only succeeded in killing herself.
US forces found a recent Belgian passport with her remains, triggering a European-wide intelligence operation.
Claude Moniquet, an intelligence analyst and director general of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, said: "The family are completely devastated, but sadly this is the classic profile: someone with bad family ties, and a history of trouble with the law.
"It allowed terrorist recruiters to work on her."
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