Making of Muriel the suicide bomber

Her school friends and neighbours remember her as ‘a good little girl’. So what made her turn into the first female European suicide bomber.

Sunday Times Review/December 4, 2005
By Nicola Smith

On the quiet streets of Charleroi, a bleak industrial city in southern Belgium, residents are in a state of shock. Just as the city was starting to recover from playing unwitting host to the crimes of the child murderer Marc Dutroux, it woke on Thursday to news of another horror.

Muriel Degauque, a pretty blonde 38-year-old brought up in a modest redbrick house in the shadows of the coal tip, had become the first European female suicide bomber. Her parents, a crane driver and hospital secretary, had known nothing of her violent mission.

On November 9 Degauque detonated explosives she had strapped to her body in an attempt to wipe out a convoy of American soldiers north of Baghdad. According to conflicting reports, she either killed six people or succeeded merely in blowing up herself.

Early last Wednesday, after being informed by police, her mother Liliane knocked on her best friend’s door in tears. “I’ve lost my daughter,” she wept. “I now have no children.”

There were more tears as residents of the social housing complex where Muriel spent her formative years struggled to understand how the little girl who had played with their children had chosen to end her life so brutally in the name of jihad.

“I feel sick when I think about it,” said one. “It’s so sad for all her old friends and I can’t imagine what it must be like for her parents,” said another.

Serge Beghin, a local councillor, knew her well as a child. Muriel had celebrated her first communion with his sister and he had been in her brother’s class at school. “She was just like all the other girls, dreaming I suppose about becoming a teacher or a nurse,” he said.

In fact, the general consensus in Charleroi was of a “lovely, good little girl” who adored to play in the snow. She had, it was said, perhaps fallen in with a bad crowd in her adolescent years.

Andrea Dorange, who had known Muriel from the age of five, said: “She was an adorable little girl, smiling all the time. But then, later, everything became . . . different. She was really weak and very easily influenced.”

By the time she had left school at 16, Muriel was experimenting with drugs and often running away from home, one time disappearing to the hilly Ardennes region 100 miles away without her parents’ knowledge. One neighbour recalled how she had found Degauque sleeping on the doorstep of the local community centre, having spent the night out in the open.

Like some teenagers, she had a turbulent and distant relationship with her parents, who found her difficult to control. She was pretty, her mother says, and so popular with boys she wasn’t even sure how many boyfriends she’d had.

Those who knew her best believe a defining moment was the death of her brother in a motorbike accident in 1989. Jean-Paul Degauque died on his 24th birthday when a car crashed into him after running past a stop sign.

It was Muriel who had to break the news to her parents, and friends say the family never quite recovered from his death.

Muriel was very close to her “charming” brother, who was the first-born and adored by their parents and everyone who knew them.

Andrea Dorange said the young girl broke down at her brother’s funeral, consumed with grief and guilt.

“When Jean-Paul died, she completely changed. She was always sad and she told me that it was unfair that her brother had died and that she should have died in his place,” she said.

A downward spiral began. She worked for a short while in a bakery, where she was remembered mostly for her frequent absences and displaying signs of drug abuse. Later she had a job in a cafe, but that was the only employment that people remember her ever having. Her mother said she had an irregular work history and was claiming state benefits.

Her childhood friends seemed to lose track of her when, in her early twenties, she moved to Brussels. She married a Belgian man of Turkish origin but later divorced him. She converted to Islam four years ago when she struck up a new relationship with an Algerian man.

It was the beginning of a new life.

Her former school friend Manuela, 39, remembers her last meeting with Muriel more than eight years ago at a bus stop. She failed to recognise her because her face was concealed by a veil.

“She called over to me and asked if I still knew her. It was a shock to see her like that but she seemed to be happy,” she said.

But Degauque’s apparent happiness soon came to an end when she married Moroccan-born Issam Goris, seven years her junior. She changed her name to Myriam and her parents began to worry about the radical turn her Muslim faith had taken, fearing she had been brainwashed.

Goris tried to impose his own rules when visiting her parents, insisting the women and men ate separately and banning beer and television.

“The last time we saw them we told them that we had had enough of them trying to indoctrinate us,” said Liliane. Her outstanding memory of her daughter’s increasing remoteness was when she spent two weeks in a hospital just a few hundred yards from where Muriel was working.

“She did not come to see me once,” said Liliane. “When I got out I asked if she still remembered she had a mother. She looked at me and I said, ‘Well, you didn’t come to see me’.”

In Brussels the couple were keeping a low profile in their rundown apartment block on Rue de Mérode in the heart of an immigrant quarter near the main railway station. Muriel cloaked herself in a burqa, wearing gloves that concealed her pale hands. Last week many of her neighbours were astonished to learn she had been the suicide bomber who was dominating headlines. Most had not even realised the unassuming woman next door was a white Belgian.

One neighbour, a 22-year-old woman from Sierra Leone, said she had not got to know the couple, but every week noticed a pile of shoes in the hallway when many people came to their flat to pray.

Neighbours of Muriel’s parents rarely saw the young couple, but were taken aback when they did: on a couple of occasions they arrived at the family home in a luxurious white Mercedes.

“I had to ask myself where they got the money from,” says Christiane Calwaerts, the next-door neighbour. The last time the Mercedes was seen on the street was in August, shortly before Muriel headed to the Middle East with her husband.

The couple gave no indication to Muriel’s family that they would not be returning, though they told the local postman to deliver their mail to a postal box without leaving any forwarding address.

Their landlord believed they were heading to Kenya. A local cafe owner said Goris had “said goodbye and that they were going to Morocco, to Meknes, where he apparently came from”.

“The last time I spoke to my daughter on the telephone was a month ago. She told me she was in Syria,” said Liliane. She tried her mobile on several occasions but the calls went through to voice mail. She tried on Tuesday at 10.30pm, again without success.

“I had a bad feeling when I was watching the news on television and they were talking about a Belgian (suicide bomber),” she said.

Her fears were realised when police officers turned up at the doorstep at 6am on Wednesday. They broke the news of their daughter’s suicide bombing at Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Muriel herself had not died immediately after detonating the bomb. Her husband had suffered a less painful end, a single shot to the head fired by American soldiers in a separate incident on the same day.

At her local mosque in Monceau sur Sambre, imam Fadel Abdallah did not fear a backlash against Muslims.

“We have good community relations,” he said. “This was caused by her own problems and those who pushed her to do this.” Nevertheless, Belgium, home to many thousands of immigrants of north African descent, is now asking itself if it can expect more tragic stories like Muriel’s.

Claude Moniquet, from the Brussels-based European Strategic Intelligence and Security Centre, admitted Muriel Degauque could become a “model” for other fanatical young women to follow.

“She had a classic profile for a convert to radical Islam,” he said. “She had a drug problem when she was younger, she had no real job, and was not very close to her family. Maybe she thought that she had no future and she was clearly under the influence of her husband who was a radical. What is surprising is that she was a young European woman, but we could maybe expect more cases.”

Public fears are growing that this was not an isolated incident after police swooped on several households in Charleroi, Antwerp, Tongres and Brussels last week. Five north Africans are still in custody. One couple in Antwerp, of Moroccan origin, were reportedly arrested before they headed on a similar journey of death.

Mohamed Reha, a Belgian of Moroccan origin who was arrested earlier in November, told police there were several wives of imprisoned Islamic extremists who were also prepared to take their own lives, and others with them. It was revealed on Friday that Pascal Cruypennick, also a white Belgian of European origin, had been arrested on suspicion of having sent suicide bombers to Iraq. He too had suffered a troubled childhood through the divorce of his parents and being beaten by his father. He later spent time in prison before finding work as a kitchen hand and marrying, then divorcing an African woman. Cruypennick converted to Islam three years ago. His neighbours never suspected this quiet man may have harboured deadly intent.

Meanwhile, the distraught parents of Muriel Degauque have been left to mourn. By Thursday morning Liliane was too exhausted to talk. Looking defeated and haggard, with the door only slightly ajar, she said she had just returned from hospital and the police had told her not to talk to anyone else. “She’s broken, crying, ill and seems close to a nervous breakdown,” said her neighbour Andrea Dorange. “They are good people and they never deserved this to happen.”