MIDDLE EAST: An Iraqi woman suspected of being the failed fourth suicide bomber linked to three hotel blasts in Amman, last night made an apparent confession on state-run TV in Jordan.
The woman, identified by police as Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi (35) is the wife of one of three Iraqi suicide bombers who attacked the hotels in the Jordanian capital on Wednesday, killing 57 people and injuring hundreds.
"My husband wore one [ bomb] belt and I another - he told me how to use it," she said, before explaining how they targeted the Radisson SAS hotel. "We went into the hotel. He took one corner and I took another. There was a wedding in the hotel. There were women and children.
"My husband executed the attack. I tried to detonate and it failed. People started running and I ran with them." Ms al-Rishawi, wearing a white headscarf, spoke with an Iraqi accent and said she was from the Iraqi city of Ramadi. She said she had travelled from Iraq to Jordan with her husband on November 5th. Both had used false passports.
Police had earlier identified the other bombers as Ms al-Rishawi's husband, Ali Hussein Ali al-Shamari (35); Rawad Jassem Mohammed Abed (23); and Safaa Mohammed Ali (23). They said all three were from the volatile western Iraqi province of Anbar.
Al-Qaida in Iraq, the organisation led by Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, last week claimed responsibility for the bombings, which it attributed to a team of four suicide bombers.
At a press conference before Ms al-Rishawi's televised appearance, Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher told reporters the Iraqi woman had failed to blow herself up after apparently struggling with the primer cord on her explosives belt.
Giving the first detailed account of the bombers' movements, Mr Muasher said the four Iraqis rented an apartment in an upmarket area of west Amman in early November. They took taxis to the hotels, the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn, on the evening of the bombings.
Dressed up as if they were going to a party, Ms al-Rishawi and her husband went to the ballroom at the Radisson SAS, where around 300 people were attending a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding reception.
"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," Mr Muasher said.
When al-Shamari noticed his wife was struggling to detonate her bomb, he "pushed her out of the ballroom. Once she was out, he blew himself up." Mr Muasher did not provide details of how the woman was arrested, saying intelligence officials were continuing to question her. He described her as the sister of Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, a former deputy of al-Zarqawi believed to have been killed by US forces in Falluja.
Reuters adds: Syria gave a hero's burial yesterday to Moustapha Akkad, the local-born Hollywood producer killed with his daughter in Wednesday's bombings.
Akkad is best-known internationally as producer of the Halloween horror films, but is most famous in the Arab world for directing a film about early Islam and another about a leader of the Libyan resistance against Italian occupation. President Bashar al-Assad signed a decree awarding Akkad one of Syria's top medals for "his Arab nationalist stances".
His two most famous films among Arabs starred Anthony Quinn.
The Message was a controversial 1976 epic about early Islam in which Quinn plays an uncle of Islam's Prophet Muhammad.
His 1981 Lion of the Desert depicts Quinn as Omar Mukhtar, a Libyan resistance leader fighting the Italian forces from the early part of the last century.
Akkad (70) left Aleppo in the 1950s to study in Los Angeles.