From Belgian cul-de-sac to suicide bomber in Iraq

Baghdad - Liliane Degauque was in tears as she walked across the small patch of grass to the house of her closest friend. "I have lost my daughter and now I have no more children," Mme Degauque whispered. It was with those words she confirmed that Europe's first woman suicide bomber was the former rebellious child who used to play outside her front door.

Hardly anyone in the tight-knit community of Monceau-sur-Sambre, on the outskirts of Charleroi, was surprised to hear that "la kamikaze Belge" was Mme Degauque's daughter, Muriel, 38.

After a troubled upbringing in the quiet postwar cul-de-sac of L'Avenue de l'Europe, with immaculately tended front lawns and elaborate net curtains, Muriel converted to Islam when she married a man of north African origin. Relations soon became strained with her parents who believe their daughter was "brainwashed" by her husband.

Muriel Degauque's life came to an end just over three weeks ago on a roadside in Baquba, north of Baghdad, when she blew herself up in an attack on an Iraqi police patrol on November 9. Five policemen were killed outright and a sixth officer and four civilians were seriously injured.

It took a few hours for Myriam - as she called herself after her second marriage to Hissam Goris - to earn her grisly place in the history books. Unlike most volunteers, who are killed the moment they detonate the explosives strapped to their bodies, she took some time to die from her severe injuries. Hours later, her husband, a Belgian of Moroccan origin, was killed by US security forces in Iraq.

As Muriel's life slipped away next to a large crater created by her bomb, security forces uncovered a treasure trove of documents which eventually led Belgian police to knock on her parents' front door at 6.00am on Wednesday. Her passport, which featured a striking image of a European woman, told the security forces that insurgents in Iraq had succeeded in recruiting a new type of suicide bomber. Travel papers showed that Muriel and her husband had travelled from Belgium to Iraq overland by car from Turkey.

Her parents were told nothing for three weeks because Belgian and French police used the information gleaned from the documents to mount surveillance operations on groups which allegedly sent the couple to Iraq. In the early hours of Wednesday morning police in Brussels, Charleroi, Antwerp and Paris launched a series of raids and arrested 15 people who allegedly recruited suicide bombers for the insurgents in Iraq.

Hours after the raids, police in Charleroi - a bleak former industrial town south of Brussels - delivered the news to Muriel's parents. But they had already guessed the worst. Mme Degauque, who last spoke to her daughter in Syria a month ago, told the Gazette newspaper: "I had a bad feeling when I heard the news on Tuesday night. When they rang the doorbell I immediately told police investigators they were coming about my daughter. They were surprised."

After a difficult upbringing, in which their daughter frequently ran away, Liliane and her husband Jean watched as she grew apart from her family who still live in the same small terrace house. During a spell as an assistant in a baker's in Charleroi, Muriel met and married a man of Turkish origin whose parents were part of the large influx to the local mines in the 1960s. After the marriage fell apart, she lived with another man of north African origin, who is alleged to have influenced her radical Islamist beliefs. Three years ago she married Hissam Goris who took his new wife to Morocco, though they were careful to return home so they would not lose unemployment benefits. The couple eventually settled in in the rundown area around the Gare du Midi in Brussels where many Muslims live.

Muriel's parents spoke of the cultural gulf which strained relations on the rare occasions that their daughter was driven to their house by her husband in his Mercedes, which raised eyebrows in the quiet cul-de-sac where he was known to be unemployed. "Muriel became more Muslim than a Muslim," her mother told Le Parisien newspaper. "When she first converted she wore a simple veil. But with her last husband she wore a [head to toe] chador."

Eventually relations became impossible. "When we saw them they imposed their own rules," her mother told La Derniere Heure newspaper. "We would be at home but my husband had to eat in the kitchen with Hissam while the women stayed in the sitting room. The last time we saw them we told them we had had enough of them trying to indoctrinate us."

Mme Degauque, who lost her son in a motorbike accident 18 years ago, has painful memories of her daughter who had refused to visit her in hospital. "I don't have time for that," her daughter said.

A few miles from the L'Avenue de l'Europe and Mme Degauque's brick house, Fadel Abdallah, imam of Arrahama de Marchienne mosque, looks at a picture of Muriel on the front page of the local paper. He paused and said: "Is she a Muslim? Allah says that if you kill, it is like killing the whole world." -- Guardian News

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