The girl who went from baker's assistant to Baghdad bomber

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-1900483,00.html


Family puzzles over life of West’s first woman suicide bomber


SHE came from an ordinary family in an industrial Belgian town. She used to sell baguettes in a bakery, and worked as a waitress in a café. She showed the rebelliousness of a typical teenager, but even in their worst dreams her parents never imagined that Muriel Degauque would end her life by blowing herself up in a suicide bomb attack against American troops in Iraq.

The story of the 38-year-old Belgian’s journey from baker’s assistant to Baghdad bomber, making her the first Western woman suicide bomber, emerged in shocking detail yesterday as her parents tried to make sense of her life.

Jean and Liliane Degauque, a former crane operator and medical secretary, said that they had watched their daughter’s gradual transition from Christian to Islamic zealot, and feared the worst when they saw the TV news on Tuesday.

“For about a month we had been trying to call her and just kept getting her voice mail. When we heard on Tuesday evening on the television that a Belgian woman had blown herself up in Iraq, we thought it was Muriel,” her mother said.

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1. "thank you lord, for the healing gift of religion"

-bill hicks, RIP

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2. I don't think racial profiling would have helped on this one n/t

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3. actually, that's wrong

if you could somehow profile european women in full islamic dress driving over the border from syria to iraq with their not-iraqi arab husbands, you'd have a fair idea that something was odd.