Failed Jordan suicide bomber on television
Wearing a disabled explosives belt and a white headscarf and wringing her hands as she spoke, the Iraqi woman calmly described how she tried and failed to join her husband in a suicide attack on a hotel wedding party.
Millions of viewers across Jordan and the region watched as Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi gave her televised confession hours after she was arrested yesterday – an arrest that resulted in part from al-Qaida’s mistaken boast of her ”martyrdom".
Al-Rishawi explained how her husband helped plan Wednesday’s attacks, fitted her suicide bomb belt and blew himself up with his own bomb at the Radisson SAS - one of three hotels attacked by three Iraqi men.
“My husband detonated (his bomb) and I tried to explode (mine) but it wouldn’t,” said the 35-year-old al-Rishawi.
“People fled running and I left running with them,” she said during the three-minute segment, which showed her handling several pieces of the faulty trigger equipment that failed to set off about 22 pounds (10 kilograms) of RDX explosives and hundreds of ball-bearings.
The attackers killed 57 other people at the Radisson SAS, Grand Hyatt and Days Inn hotels.
Al-Rishawi’s brother was once a deputy of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, said deputy premier Marwan Muasher. He said the brother, Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, was killed in the former terrorist stronghold of Fallujah, Iraq.
Officials believe al-Rishawi, who entered Jordan from Iraq on November 5, may provide significant information about the operations of al-Zarqawi’s group, which claimed responsibility for the hotel bombings, Jordan’s deadliest terrorist attacks. The group said the attacks were retaliation for Jordanian support for the US and other Western powers.
Al-Rishawi was shown on state television wearing a buttoned, body-length dark denim dress. Muasher told CNN the belts she also wore on the broadcast were captured with her.
Al-Rishawi said she and her husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari, 35, were wearing explosive-laden belts when they strolled into the Radisson ballroom where hundreds of guests, including children, were attending a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding reception.
“My husband wore a belt and put one on me. He taught me how to use it, how to pull the (primer cord) and operate it,” she said.
Muasher said al-Rishawi’s husband noticed her struggle when the belt failed and pushed her out of the ballroom in order not to attract attention before blowing himself up.
Al-Rishawi, who is from the volatile Anbar province town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, said on state TV that she entered Jordan from Iraq four days before the attacks with her husband and two other men using fake passports. She said they rode across the border in a white car with a driver and another passenger.
