Lying in her bath, girl who became La Femme Kamikaze
LUXURIATING in a bubble-bath, wearing diamond studs in her ears and make-up deftly applied to enhance her striking looks, she could be modelling for a high-class magazine.
In other remarkable photos obtained exclusively by the MailOnline yesterday, the woman the French are now calling ‘La Femme Kamikaze’ is seen posing for carefree selfies with friends.
A less likely Islamic terrorist is difficult to imagine. Yet this is 26-year-old Hasna Ait Boulahcen, who blew herself up two days ago in the dramatic early morning siege at a flat in the northern Paris suburb of St Denis.
Difficult as it as to comprehend, in a matter of months this glamorous, extroverted, partyloving young woman became so fanatically committed to her twisted cause that she defied every feminine instinct to become Europe’s first female suicide bomber.
Even after a week of so many horrific scenes that we seemed to have moved beyond shock, her last moments – partly captured on a mobile phone video – made truly bloodcurdling viewing.
‘Where is your boyfriend? Where is he?’ an armed police officer yells, as her robed silhouette appears at the flat’s darkened window.
‘He’s not my boyfriend!’ Boulahcen shouts back twice, hysterically.
Then, after apparently refusing an order to keep her hands raised, the pre-dawn silence is shattered by cracks of gunfire. It is followed by the sound of her suicide belt exploding, her remains fluttering through the night sky to bespatter the pavement, three storeys below.
Some might think we ought not to describe her end in such grisly detail. But without it, how can we begin to understand the full horror of her action? How can we grasp the extent to which the mind of this young French-Moroccan woman had been so thoroughly corrupted?
Barely a few months ago, as the pictures show, Boulahcen was still every inch the young Parisian girl-about-town. Friends jokingly dubbed her ‘The Female Cowboy’ because of her penchant for big, broad-brimmed hats.
Family and acquaintances gave extraordinary accounts of a young woman with a ‘bad reputation’ who was known for her love of alcohol and cigarettes rather than devotion to Islam. They said she had had no interest in religion, never read the Koran.
Then, in an astonishingly short time, according to friends, she swapped her hat and colourful dresses for a niqab (the traditional Islamic robe that covers every part of a woman’s body but for her eyes) and a series of alarming posts began to appear on her Facebook page.
In one she expressed the hope that she would soon leave Paris for Syria, even disclosing her intention to sneak in through Turkey.
In another, she spoke of her admiration for France’s most wanted woman, Hayat Boumedienne, who has been on the run since her boyfriend’s murderous attack on a Jewish supermarket following the Charlie Hebdo massacre last January.
This message was juxtaposed with the chilling photograph of the black-robed terror-queen crouching with a deadly crossbow.
Quite plainly she hero-worshipped Boumedienne, who was also from North African immigrant stock and shared a similarly troubled background – which prompts us to wonder whether she turned to terrorism out of some warped desire to emulate her.
Her mother thinks not. Instead, she blames her daughter’s first cousin, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the architect of the Paris massacres, who was yesterday also confirmed to have been killed in the early morning raid on the flat.
‘The son of my sister brainwashed her,’ said Mrs Boulahcen, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail yesterday at her flat – by chance situated a few miles from Charles de Gaulle Airport, believed to have been the next target for the Islamic State killers.
‘It’s awful,’ she told us, her face raw with grief. ‘We have not slept. We have been up all night. My daughter is lovely. We can’t believe it. He [Abaaoud] has messed with her head. He went mad. He did things with her head.’
Perhaps so, yet the possibility that La Femme Kamikaze saw herself as the next Boumedienne – and, more disturbingly, that the fugitive fundamentalist has become an icon for other gullible young Muslim women – becomes more
‘Her cousin messed with her head. He brainwashed her’
compelling when we compare the two women’s formative years. Both came from broken homes, both were placed in foster care, and both later rebelled and went off the rails.
Boulahcen’s unhappy childhood was described yesterday by her older brother, Youssouff.
‘She had been the victim of violence she was very young – mistreated and rejected,’ he said mournfully, without elaborating on who had abused her. ‘She never received the love she needed.
‘From the age of five, she was taken into care, so she grew up in the foster family of Madame Vasse [her foster-mother]. She was happy and flourished at that point in her adolescence.
‘Then, as she grew up, she went off the rails. She became reckless and [began] choosing bad company.
‘I was never close to her because we lived apart, but during the opportunities I had to talk to her she was full of enthusiasm, although her instability always dragged her down. She was not grounded.’
In recent years, Boulahcen’s brother said, their relationship had become ‘complicated’ because she began ‘criticising everything’ and refused to accept his advice.
For a while, he told the Mail, she lived with her father, a former production line worker making Peugeot cars who now divides his time between his native Morocco and a house in the little eastern French town of Creutzwald, in the scenic Moselle wine country.
Then, after falling out with her boyfriend – whom he did not name – Boulahcen returned to live with her mother, who now shares her fourth-floor apartment on a rundown estate with an Egyptian man. It was then that Boulahcen swapped her fashionable clothes for traditional Islamic ones. At first she left her face uncovered, but ‘about a month ago’ she started wearing the niqab.
By this time, says her brother, she was ‘living in her own world’. Yet he had never once seen her study religion or open the Koran.
Instead, he says, she was permanently on her phone, looking at Facebook and the WhatsApp messenger service. We can but guess the sort of sites she was checking, and the messages she might have been receiving. When he remonstrated with her, however, she told him he had no right to interfere in her life. And about three weeks ago she said she had decided to move in with a female friend elsewhere in Paris.
He last spoke to his sister at 7pm last Sunday, two days after the Paris massacre, when she returned his call. ‘She sounded like she had given up on life,’ he said, so he drove to see her but she didn’t answer the door.
On Wednesday morning he turned on the TV to find she had killed herself, ‘sacrificing the life the Lord had given her’. He added that his sister had ‘a good heart’ and hoped God would forgive her.
Neighbours of Boulahcen’s mother were similarly dumbstruck. One retired factory worker recalled how she would carry his shopping for him. ‘She was a very well-spoken girl,’ he told the Mail. ‘Very respectful. Very lively. Very dynamic.
‘I can’t believe she is part of this sect. They must have groomed her. It was only about eight months ago that she became a practising Muslim.’
Other neighbours described Boulahcen as a free-spirited young woman who was slightly eccentric and seemed not to care what people thought of her.
She made her own rap music before her sudden conversion, according to one young woman who lives in the building.
As that neighbour watched video footage of the raid in St Denis, and heard the woman shouting at the police, she told us that she knew instantly, by the distinctive ‘gravelly, deep voice’ that it was Boulahcen who had died.
Like everyone else who knew this beautiful young woman, however, she cannot begin to fathom why someone who clearly relished life, and its luxuries, could have become La Femme Kamikaze.