In her black coat and white headscarf, Sajida al-Rishawi looked like many other Arab women. But the shapeless garment made it easy for her to conceal a belt of explosives and a belt of ball bearings — and her mission, along with her husband, to blow up a hotel full of wedding guests.
Appearing on Jordanian television on Sunday night the woman (35) described how she had travelled from Iraq to Jordan to play her part in last Wednesday’s triple suicide attack on three Amman hotels that left 57 dead and more than 90 wounded.
Wearing the disarmed explosive belt over her coat, she turned around as if modelling it and demonstrated how she had planned to pull the red cord that would have detonated the explosives. Once her belt had failed to detonate as she stood among a crowd of wedding guests, however, she fled to an apartment in Amman, where she was arrested on Sunday morning.
Wringing her hands but sounding calm and confident, she described to an interviewer on live television how she and her husband, Ali Hussein Shamari, had travelled from Iraq to the Jordanian capital. There they rented an apartment and her husband taught her how to use the bomb.
”He said it was for the attack on hotels in Jordan,” she said. ”We rented a car and entered the hotel on November 5. My husband and I went inside and he went to one corner and I went to another.
”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.
At a press conference earlier in the day, Marwan Muasher, the deputy prime minister of Jordan, said that when the husband noticed his wife was having trouble detonating her bomb by pulling its primer cord, he ”pushed her out of the ballroom”.
”Once she was out, he blew himself up,” he told reporters.
The bomb strapped to the man’s body was packed with the powerful explosive RDX and ball bearings, and was designed to kill many people . If his wife had succeeded in her attempt, the carnage would have been much worse.
Shamari killed the majority of the 57 bombing victims at the Radisson hotel. All were Jordanians or Palestinians. The fathers of the bride and groom were killed and the mother of the bride is in a coma. Although those holding their hands were killed, the married couple escaped unhurt.
Muasher said the three successful suicide bombers who attacked the Grand Hyatt, Radisson and Days Inn hotels were Iraqis from Anbar, the Iraqi province bordering Jordan.
They were named as Shamari (35) Rawad Jassem Mohammed Abed (23) and Safaa Mohammed Ali (23).
Rishawi was identified as the sister of Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, a leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq in Anbar province. He was believed to have been killed by US forces in Fallujah last year.
He was reported to have been the deputy of Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq who has been sentenced to death in absentia by a Jordanian court.
The four bombers drove into Jordan from Iraq on November 4, five days before the attacks, and rented an apartment in western Amman. They left their apartment on Wednesday and took taxis to the hotels, including the Radisson, where almost 300 people were attending a wedding reception in one of the hotel’s ballrooms.
Muasher said: ”It is clear from the way she was dressed and the explosive belts with ball bearings that they wanted to target innocent civilians, and also wanted to inflict the biggest number of casualties and victims.”
The arrest of Rishawi appears to confirm the authenticity of a series of statements posted on the internet by al-Qaeda in Iraq.
The group said it had sent four Iraqis, including a husband and wife, to carry out the bombings but Jordanian police said they found the bodies of only three male bombers.
The al-Qaeda statements attempted to justify the attacks on the hotels because they were frequented by prostitutes, spies and ”apostates”.
King Abdullah II of Jordan told American television that the Iraqis had deliberately tried to kill Jordanians rather than westerners.
”This was nothing to do with the West. This targeted Jordanian citizens — innocent men, women and children,” he said. ”The majority of the country poured out to denounce what Zarqawi and al-Qaeda did, calling for Zarqawi to be brought to justice, for him to burn in hell.”
He said that Jordan was ”suffering from the effects” of the US-led Iraq war, ”but we are all hoping, I think as is everybody in the world, that at the end of the day Iraq will be part of the international community”.
Amman’s western hotels are populated by guests from all over the world. Most are engaged in work in Jordan and Iraq. However, Jordanians regularly use the banqueting rooms, restaurants, health clubs and lobbies for business and personal reasons. – Guardian Unlimited Â