FRIENDS and relatives of suicide bomber Hasna Ait Boulahcen told yesterday how she changed from a party girl with a bad attitude to a woman of pure evil. The 26-year-old was known as “cowgirl” because she was often snapped in cowboy hats on wild nights out. One who knew her recalled: “She drank alcohol and smoked and went around with a lots of guys. She had a bad reputation.” But Ait Boulahcen was to take a more sinister path after France banned the burka. She used to wear to work a niqab — which only showed her eyes. A long-time pal said Ait Boulahcen stopped working because she had enough of being told that she could not wear the veil. She had managed a Beko furniture fitting company for a year until 2014 — two years after France introduced the burka ban. Friend Khamissa, 26, who refused to give her surname, added “It’s a common thing, many people have quit working in this area because of it. It’s a choice she made along with many others.
Ait Boulahcen, who was in foster care as a child and never had a proper boyfriend, grew to idolise her cousin Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the organiser of the Paris terror attacks. Just six weeks ago she wrote against his picture on Facebook: “God is guiding him.”
Khamissa recalled: “She recently talked about going to Turkey and on to Syria, but she was a fantasist so we never took her that seriously.” “This Islamist extremism she was going through — we thought it was a phase. She was following others and she was impressionable. “If I’d have known that she would have ended up doing something like this I would have tried to bend her ear more — told her she was being stupid.
“She never had a proper boyfriend, but she was speaking to a guy online. “She asked me if I thought he was a nice guy, and was talking to him a lot. He was in France but never met up with him.” On Tuesday night Ait Boulahcen had a final meal at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant — just 200 yards from where she and Abaaoud died two days ago. She blew herself up during a seven-hour siege in the Paris suburb of Saint-Denis as she pretended to surrender to armed cops — killing police dog Diesel.
Last night armed police backed by soldiers stormed the home of her brother Youssef and her mother. It is understood they put him under house arrest as they carried out a detailed search of the fifth-storey flat on the grim Merisier tower block estate in northern Paris. In a statement, Youssef had painted his sister as a mixed-up woman who became angry with everything. He said he had not spoken much to her for five years. But he added: “She spent her time criticising everything. She refused to accept any advice, she didn’t want to sort herself out. “She was living in her own world. She was not interested in studying her religion. I never saw her open the Koran. “She was permanently on her phone, looking at Facebook or WhatsApp. “On the rare occasions that I spoke to her it was to tell her to behave better, to have a better attitude, to be more easy-going about her strict dress code. On Sunday at 7pm she called me because I’d called her, and sounded like she had given up on life.”
Youssef dashed to an address in nearby Drancy — where his sister had lived with a female pal for just three weeks — but got no answer. He went on: “On Wednesday morning I turned on the TV and I learned that she had killed herself. “From the age of five she was taken into care, so she grew up with a foster father. “She was happy and flourished at that point in her adolescence. “Then as she grew up she went off the rails. She became reckless, running away and choosing bad company. I was never very close to her because we lived apart. “During the opportunities I had to talk to her, she was full of enthusiasm, although her instability always dragged her down, “She went from one life project to another without question.”
Her natural father Mohammed lived in the French border town of Cruetzwald, where Ait Boulahcen would occasionally visit. Resident Amin Abou, 26, remembered her as a party animal who loved clubbing. He said: “I would see her in this club in Germany, which is only ten minutes away, where we go because it is much cheaper for alcohol. “She came here two or three years ago for two months. She drank alcohol and smoked and went around with a lot of guys. “She had a bad reputation.” Matthius Jacques, 24, recalled: “She was quite normal and wore Western clothes. “She was not religious at all, she did not go to a mosque or pray, she never spoke about the news or Palestine or anything.” Mohammed was born in Morocco and left for the northern Paris suburbs in 1973.
Matthius added: “He worked in a car factory but is now retired. “He goes to the mosque often but he is not strict. He lives alone.” Outside her father’s apartment block, pal Nassem said: “She would go out with a cowboy hat and we would call her the cowgirl. She liked boxing and she wasn’t religious at all. “Her father was worried about her because she was so Western.” A neighbour said: “I remember one morning going up the stairs I met her. She was a girl with jeans, trainers and quite good looking. “When they said she was the suicide bomber, I was lost for words.” Eight terror suspects were arrested on Wednesday after the siege in Saint-Denis. Yesterday it was confirmed that Ait Boulahcen’s Belgian-born cousin Abaaoud was the man who had died beside her in a hail of bullets.
www.thesun.co.uk
Labels: Abdelhamid Abaaoud, Burka, France, Hasnat Ait Boulahcen, Niqab, Paris