The woman who blew herself up during an anti-terror police raid in suburban Paris on Wednesday has been identified as a 26-year-old daughter of a Moroccan immigrant.
Her name is Hasna Aitboulahcen, The Associated Press reported, citing three unnamed police officials. The officials said she’d described herself in the past as a cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected ringleader of the Nov. 13 terror attacks in Paris. But her actual relationship to Abaaoud remains unclear.
French officials have not publicly identified her.
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The woman detonated a suicide vest as police stormed an apartment in the suburb of Saint-Denis as part of the search for those responsible for planning and executing the attacks.
In an audio recording of the raid an officer can be heard shouting, “Where is your boyfriend?” The woman replies, “He’s not my boyfriend.”
Then there are gunshots, an explosion, and more gunshots.
Jean-Luc Wosniak, the mayor of Creutzwald, where Aitboulahcen lived for a time, told NBC News her family first arrived in the Paris region in 1973. She was born in Clichy-la-Garenne, a suburb near Saint-Denis, in 1989. Her father, Mohammed, moved to Creutzwald eight years ago, when she was 16, Wosniak said.
The mayor told The AP that she had a sister and two brothers, and that the four children spent some time in foster care. Soon after, she moved to Paris, Wosniak said. When she registered her short-lived company, Beko Construction, in 2013, she listed her father’s address. But he returned to Morocco in July 2015. Former neighbors in the Paris neighborhood of Aulnay-sous-Bois told Reuters she’d been mistreated as a child, renounced Islam, and was seen drinking, smoking and doing drugs. But earlier this year, they said, she showed up in a hijab and veil, saying she’d become a jihadist. But the neighbors said they thought she was joking. The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this post, which first appeared on NBCNews.com.
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