Belgium on Edge as Female Suicide Bomber's Terror Cell Jailed

By Paul Cruickshank

Today five men were found guilty of being part of a Brussels-based terrorist cell that sent Muriel Degauque, a pretty Belgian baker’s assistant to die in Iraq. On November 9, 2005 Degauque became Al Qaeda’s first western female suicide bomber in Iraq when she drove an explosives-laden vehicle into an American military convoy on a highway north of Baghdad. No American soldiers were killed. The next day her husband, Issam Goris, who had accompanied her to Iraq was shot dead by U.S. forces in the Fallujah area as he prepared to launch a suicide bombing attack. When news of Degauque’s death was revealed to the press several weeks later it hit front pages around the world.

The five men jailed today, with sentences ranging between two and ten years, were Bilal Soughir, his younger brother Souhaieb, Younis Loukili, Nabil Karmun, and a Flemish convert, Pascal Cruypenninck.

According to evidence produced at court and interviews I have conducted with Belgian counter-terrorism officials, the Brussels based cell helped organize the logistics for Degauque and her husband to travel to Iraq and hook up with jihadists linked to Abu Musab al Zarqawi in the fall of 2005. Time spent amongst the radical circle helped persuade Degauque, angry at U.S. behavior in Iraq, to join the fight there.

Belgian intelligence services started monitoring the Brussels based group in the spring of 2005 and were soon aware of their radical views. Some of its members, for example, talked about how there was nothing better than to become a martyr in Iraq.

At trial it emerged that Bilal Soughir, the ringleader of the group, had by 2005 developed a web of connections with Al Qaeda and affiliated groups across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In the two years before his arrest he made trips to Kenya, Ukraine and Tunisia, sometimes bringing over $10,000 in cash with him, despite claiming unemployment benefits. Soughir also wired money to an individual called Abou Mazen in Turkey, a suspected recruiter for the Zarqawi network in Iraq.

Some of the members of the Brussels cell themselves fought in Iraq. In 2004 Younis Loukili traveled from Syria to Iraq and lost a leg fighting there, something he denied in the first weeks of the trial, claiming that he had lost it because of a traffic accident in Syria. But in a sensational turn-around midway through the trial Loukili told the court that he had indeed lost the leg fighting U.S. forces in Fallujah in November 2004 after having received basic training on how to fire truck-mounted rocket launchers. He still however denied wanting to become a suicide bomber. “The way I saw it, it was to help the Iraqis,” he told the court, “the Americans had launched an unjust war [and] my goal was to make the Americans leave and then come home.” The court also heard how a third Soughir brother, Kotob, had accompanied Loukili to fight in Iraq and was killed there.

Bilal Soughir, the convicted ringleader, had several phone communications with Issam Goris, Muriel Degauque’s husband after the couple traveled to Iraq. On October 14, 2005 Soughir was informed that the couple had reached Iraq by car. Soughir during this period also made several calls to his Turkish Al Qaeda connection Abou Mazen to arrange for Goris and Degauque to hook up with the terrorist network in Iraq, unaware that Belgian security services and U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring his calls.

On November 9 Goris, Degauque’s husband, full of joy, phoned up Soughir to tell him that Muriel had carried out a suicide bombing operation. The court was told that Soughir then called up his one-legged accomplice Loukili exclaiming, “It’s done. That’s it!” Loukili replied, “God is Great! Both of them? What on earth am I doing here?”

The Belgian intelligence services, when they received these intercepts, immediately contacted their U.S. counterparts, who were getting close to pinpointing the location of the couple’s safe-house in a race against time to find the would-be bombers. The next day U.S. special forces burst into the building were Goris was staying and shot him dead. They had got to him just in time. He already had an explosives belt strapped around his waste.

On November 12 Soughir spoke to Abou Mazen, the Al Qaeda operative in Turkey, and told him “other brothers will be coming soon.” The court also heard that in the wake of Degauque’s death, Pascal Cruypenninck, the Flemish convert, tried to persuade his own girlfriend, a Rwandan girl, only then 18, called Angelique to join him in traveling to Iraq. “If you listen to my advice,” he told her, “you’ll go far in the other life. Look where [Muriel] went.”

Belgian police rounded up Bilal Soughir’s Iraq recruiting cell in a series of dawn raids on November 30, 2005.

The verdict in their trial has come at a time when Belgium is on edge after police broke up a suspected plot to free an Al Qaeda operative from prison in December. On December 21 Belgian police arrested 14 individuals in connection with the plot. Belgian security services had obtained information suggesting that there might be an attempt to free Nizar Trabelsi, an Al Qaeda operative, who was arrested very shortly after 9/11 for plotting attacks in Europe. During his trial Trabelsi, who had met Bin Laden in Afghanistan, admitted to plotting an attack on the Klein Brogel NATO base in Belgium.

Belgian police did not find any explosives or weapons in the properties that they raided on December 21, raising concerns that the suspected-jihadists might still have explosives to launch attacks on other targets during the holiday period. Belgian police were forced to make the arrests rather than monitor the individuals for longer because information they were receiving suggested that a plot of severe gravity might be in the works. That meant they did not want to take any risks.

Belgian authorities issued a country-wide alert which lasted until January 3. In recent days Belgians have been rattled by a number of bomb alerts in train stations across the country, all of which so far have proven to be false alarms. Lacking enough evidence to press charges and unable to hold individuals for more than 24 hours, Belgian authorities had to release all 14 suspects the day after their arrest.

One of those arrested was Malika el Aroud, the wife of the Al Qaeda operative who on Bin Laden’s orders, assassinated the head of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, two days before 9/11. Aroud returned to Belgium after her husband’s death and then moved for a while to Switzerland where I interviewed her for CNN in 2006. The following year Aroud was convicted in a Swiss court of running a radical pro Al Qaeda website but received no jail sentence. She then returned to Belgium but never stopped running her website. As the widow of an Al Qaeda operative, who lived amidst Bin Laden’s wives in Jalalabad, Aroud has an obvious capability to influence individuals in extremist circles. In the last weeks Aroud has put messages on her website praying for the destruction of America and for U.S. troops in Iraq to be massacred. On her website Aroud also revealed that following her release she is being constantly monitored by Belgian police.

TrackBack