[Mb-civic] The Amman Bomber Who Failed - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

The Amman Bomber Who Failed
Alleged Iraqi Conspirator Describes Her Aborted Suicide Attack at Hotel

By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 14, 2005; 6:36 AM

AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 14 -- She twirled, almost like a model showing off 
the latest fashion, her waist a thick belt of translucent tape with 
crude red wires attached. Her hands pumped a black cylinder of plastic, 
a switch that should have blown her up in a burst of flame and metal but 
did not.

In a televised confession broadcast on state-run Jordanian television 
Sunday, Sajida Rishawi, 35, an Iraqi from the city of Fallujah, 
described how her husband pushed her out of a ballroom at the Radisson 
SAS Hotel in the Jordanian capital when her contraption failed to 
explode. His vest detonated, and a ball of flames ripped through the 
crowded hall.

Rishawi modeled the suicide vest she allegedly wore to carry out the 
attack. She spun around, showing how it should have worked. At times, 
the camera focused on her hands, which she wrung as she spoke to an 
unidentified interviewer, presumably an interrogator.

Rishawi was arrested Sunday morning for allegedly taking part in suicide 
bombings here Wednesday that killed 57 people at three hotels and jolted 
a population used to relative security.

Jordanian intelligence had been tracking Rishawi since the night of the 
bombing, officials said, when an alert was issued that a potential 
suspect wearing a black dress was seen running from the scene of the 
Radisson bombing, where 200 people had gathered for a wedding.

Two days later, al Qaeda in Iraq, an insurgent group led by Jordanian 
Abu Musab Zarqawi, posted a statement on its Web site asserting that 
three men and a woman married to one of them had died carrying out the 
coordinated attacks that struck the Grand Hyatt, Radisson and Days Inn 
hotels in downtown Amman. The statement said the woman, whom it did not 
name, "chose to accompany her husband to his martyrdom."

But the female bomber apparently did not die.

Jordanian intelligence police arrested Rishawi on Sunday morning after 
raiding the apartment in the Tela Ali neighborhood in Amman that her 
husband and the two other bombers had rented on Nov. 7, intelligence 
sources said. The bombers entered Jordan five days earlier from Iraq 
with false passports, Jordan's deputy prime minister, Marwan Muasher, 
said at a news conference Sunday.

Muasher said the husband and wife specifically targeted the wedding 
party ahead of time, pointing out that they were wearing festive 
clothes. He identified the husband as Ali Hussein Ali Shamari. He also 
said Rishawi was the sister of Mubarak Atrous Rishawi, Zarqawi's top 
deputy in the western Iraqi province of Anbar, who was killed by U.S. 
forces in Fallujah.

Muasher identified the two other bombers as Rawad Jassem Mohammed Abed 
and Safaa Mohammed Ali, both 23.

In Fallujah, relatives of the alleged bombers quietly celebrated the 
Amman blasts, calling the attackers "martyrs."

Abdullah Yousif Omar, 53, who described himself as a relative of one of 
the bombers, said they were "pioneer leaders in al Qaeda in Fallujah 
before the occupiers controlled it."

(continued)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/14/AR2005111400230.html
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