Female failed suicide bomber in IS hostage exchange connected to jihadists
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 28 January, 2015, 10:43pm
UPDATED : Wednesday, 28 January, 2015, 10:43pm
The Guardian
Sajida al-Rishawi was sentenced to death for hotel bombings. Photo: Reuters
The woman Islamic State want released from a Jordanian jail in return for Japanese hostage Kenji Goto has family ties with Iraq's most violent militant groups.
Sajida al-Rishawi, 44, is a failed suicide bomber who travelled to Jordan from Ramadi in Iraq in 2005.
She has been on death row in Jordan since long before Islamic State was established.
Goto asked for the prisoner swap in an Islamic State audio tape released at the weekend, when he referred to her as the group's "imprisoned sister".
Islamic State often calls members and supporters "brothers" or "sisters", but the word may carry more weight here.
Her brother was a close aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group that eventually mutated into Islamic State, and two other brothers died fighting US forces, The New York Times reported.
Al-Zarqawi, who was a ferocious advocate of sectarian violence so extreme that he even frayed ties with Osama bin Laden, was killed in 2006.
But he is still admired by the Islamic State followers.
He sent al-Rishawi to Jordan in 2005, along with her husband and three other men, to bomb a string of hotels in the city. They killed 57 people and injured 90, but al-Rishawi appears to have left a crucial part of her suicide bomb needed for it to go off in their car and so survived
She fled from the bombed hotel, disguised in a crowd of panicked guests and was picked up in a safe house soon after.
In a televised confession, the Iraqi woman admitted heading to the attack on a wedding party with absolute clarity and a chilling lack of empathy or remorse.
"There was a wedding at the hotel with children, women and men inside. My husband detonated [his bomb], and I tried to explode my belt but it wouldn't. People fled running and I left running with them," she said.
She is the first woman ever to be sentenced to death by Jordan's state security court, according to a US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.
