Rishawi has been held by Jordanian authorities since 2005, and has not been seen publicly in about nine years. She was arrested and later sentenced to death “for conspiracy to carry out terror acts” after a triple bomb attack on the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman, the Jordanian capital, in November 2005.
Now believed to be in her early-40s, Rishawi was arrested four days after the attack, in which her husband, Ali Hussein al-Shammari, and two other Iraqis, blew themselves up. In a television confession after her arrest, she said that she too had tried but failed to activate her explosives at a wedding reception. Sixty people died in the attack.
Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to ISIL, claimed responsibility for the bombings. “A group of our best lions launched a new attack on some dens … After casing the targets, some hotels were chosen which the Jordanian despot turned into a backyard for the enemies of the faith,” a statement on a website usually used by the group said.
ISIS has released several videos of executions of captured enemy fighters, activists and journalists. The armed group has taken large parts of Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate in territory under its control in June. Since then it has fought the Syrian and Iraqi governments, other armed groups and Kurdish forces.
Credit: Aljazeera
