PARIS — The first female European Muslim convert to commit a suicide bombing in Iraq was a former bakery worker from a middle-class Belgian family who joined her husband in an extremist network that sent them to fight and die, authorities said Thursday.
As details emerged about a case involving at least one other suspected female jihadist, Belgian authorities decided to hold for prosecution five associates of the slain couple who had been arrested Tuesday and Wednesday, including the alleged leader of the network.
The Belgian woman died Nov. 9 during a car bomb attack on a U.S. troop convoy. Authorities identified her Thursday as Muriel Degauque, 36, a native of a town near the industrial city of Charleroi in southern Belgium.
Degauque's father is a retired factory worker and her mother is a secretary, officials said. Degauque had drug problems in her youth, married a Muslim and converted to Islam in her early 20s, they added. She plunged into fundamentalism several years ago with her second husband, a Moroccan-born extremist identified as Issam Goris.
"This was not a very young woman, but she was fragile psychologically," said a top Belgian law enforcement official involved in the investigation. The official requested anonymity for security reasons.
Degauque's mother, Lilliane, learned of her daughter's death Wednesday as police announced the arrests of 14 suspects in four Belgian cities and one near Paris. The mother told journalists she had not been able to reach her daughter by telephone for weeks. She said Goris and her daughter had been obsessively religious, pressuring relatives to shun television, cigarettes and alcohol and withdrawing into a secretive world.
"She was totally anchored in that religion," the mother told the newspaper Le Parisien. "She lived only for that. She learned Arabic.... She was very secretive, with a very independent character. I am furious at those who manipulated her."
Determined to become "martyrs" together, the couple made an odyssey by car from their home in Brussels through Turkey and into Iraq, U.S. and Belgian investigators said.
After the car bombing north of Baghdad, which slightly injured one soldier, U.S. troops found Degauque's passport, investigators said. Her husband died in a subsequent gunfight after Belgian police wiretaps helped lead U.S. troops to a hide-out near Fallouja.
