Belgian provides grim first in Iraq

PARIS — An Islamic extremist from Belgium has achieved a grim milestone by becoming the first female European convert to commit a suicide bombing in Iraq, police said Wednesday after arresting 15 suspects linked to the woman in Belgium and France.

The Belgian woman, 36, died Nov. 9 in the car-bombing of a U.S. military convoy after traveling with her Moroccan-born husband to Iraq to join foreign fighters in a network led by militant kingpin Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, investigators said.

No troops were killed in the attack.

The case illustrates the growing role of converts and women in Europe's increasingly fierce and violent Islamic networks, investigators said. It also apparently marks the first suicide bombing anywhere by a female Islamic convert of European descent, European and U.S. investigators said.

The suicide bombing north of Baghdad accelerated cooperation between U.S. authorities and Belgian police, whose intercepts of phone conversations between suspects in Belgium and Iraq helped U.S. troops track down a cell of foreign fighters preparing additional attacks, investigators said.

In an assault on a hide-out in Fallujah a few days after the suicide bombing, U.S. troops killed the husband, who was found wearing an explosives-rigged vest, and four others, Belgian authorities said.

"He was killed by American soldiers," said Glen Audenart, director of Belgium's federal police, during a news conference in which he announced the arrests of 14 suspects in Brussels, Antwerp, Charleroi and Tongres. In addition, French police arrested a Tunisian, 27, a suspected associate of the bomber's husband, in an industrial suburb north of Paris on Wednesday.

The suspects arrested in Europe include another Belgian convert and a mix of Moroccans, Tunisians and Belgians of North African descent, including a married couple in Antwerp who were reportedly about to leave for Iraq.