She was the first female suicide bomber to have ever appeared on the European landscape. When she blew herself up in an apartment building just outside of Paris, her brutal and tumultuous life finally ended.
While Paris police have not revealed her identity, she is believed to have been 26-year-old French citizen Hasna Aitboulahcen. When police raided an apartment building in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis on Wednesday she was among the casualties. French police and army commandos stormed the building in an effort to capture the mastermind of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud.
Inside, however, was Hasna, according to The Financial Times. When security forces knocked on the door they ordered her to surrender her boyfriend. She shouted back at them that Abaaoud was not her boyfriend. She was, however, related to him. It was the beginning of a raid that left everyone dead as police and soldiers ended up emptying over 5,000 rounds.
It was also the first incident of a female suicide bomber on European soil.
As the attack commenced and the soldiers rushed in, Hasna triggered her vest and the explosion took half the building with it. Her parents entered France from Morocco sometime during the early 1970s. She was born just north of Paris in 1989 and moved toward the German border when she was 16 years old.
In 2006 she and her siblings moved into a housing project. She and her three siblings had been continuously shuffled from one foster family to the next. Her Facebook page claimed that she attended university but the school she mentioned shows no records for her at all.
In 2005 she was living in a French city where there were huge riots at the time. This made a grave impression on her as hundreds of vehicles were burned and many buildings were severely damaged as the French citizenry made sure their protests were paid attention to. She often went back to the city where her father lives to visit with him.
Friends recalled that she was a heavy drinker and that everyone called her “The Cowgirl” because she always wore a large hat wherever she went. She drops off the grid after 2013 but it is believed that she followed Abaaoud to Syria after going to the terrorist hot spot of Molenbeek near Brussels.
Her last Facebook entry was on June 11. She said that, God willing, she would be leaving Syria soon.
