Shaken residents of a Philadelphia suburb expressed fear and concern after learning that their blond, blue-eyed neighbor secretly called herself “JihadJane” and planned global terror attacks.
“It’s kinda scary they can get this close to home,” an elderly man who lived on the same street as LaRose told a local TV station after “JihadJane” — real name Colleen LaRose — was indicted on Tuesday for conspiring to support terrorists and to kill in a foreign country.
Her former boyfriend told CNN that LaRose used to spend long hours on the Internet, and indictment papers listed a string of e-mails and online postings in which she allegedly said she wanted to become a martyr and could use her European looks to “blend in with many people.”
Later e-mails showed that LaRose had been instructed by a male contact in South Asia to move to Sweden, find a person whose name was redacted from the indictment and “kill him in a way that the whole Kufar [non-believer] world get frightened.”
On the day LaRose was indicted, four men and three women were arrested in Ireland, accused of plotting to kill Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks, who had a US$100,000 bounty placed on his head by an al-Qaeda-linked group because of a caricature he drew of Islam’s Prophet Mohammed.
“I’ve been saying for years that women are just as capable as men at carrying out attacks or planning them. In fact, they’re more capable,” said Farhana Ali, a terrorism expert on Islamic radicalization and women. “Women are more frightening to us because they’re less obvious and therefore less suspected of taking any role” in terrorism.
“It scares the hell out of me because I have three young kids and it scares me to know there was a terrorist around here,” a neighbor said on local TV station WFMZ.
LaRose’s neighbors in Pennsburg said they were especially surprised that her shift to radical Islam occurred under the nose of her unsuspecting live-in boyfriend.
“She was the fun-loving woman he met in Texas and she came to Pennsylvania to live with him,” Kitty Caparella, a reporter for the Philadelphia Daily News who interviewed JihadJane’s ex, told CNN. “Pennsburg is a small town, a quaint Pennsylvania town.”
“Maybe she was looking for a little excitement online,” she said.
LaRose’s boyfriend told CNN that the alleged would-be assassin who was indicted on Tuesday “doesn’t sound like the person that I knew,” adding that his former girlfriend had taken care of her father until his death last August.
LaRose’s transformation is “one of our worst nightmares playing out,” said Jerrold Post, author of The Mind of the Terrorist and director of the political psychology program at George Washington University.
“Individuals carrying American, British, French, any European passport who are indistinguishable from other citizens and who have been somehow radicalized ... I have every reason to believe this will be increasing in frequency,” Post said.
The case shows the power of the Internet in radicalizing new adherents of extremist views, experts said.
“The virtual community of hatred is one of the most worrisome aspects of this,” Post said.
Experts also warned that her case may not be a singular one.
“The really scary thing is there are bound to be other people like her,” Ali said.
“She has a social network, someone indoctrinated her. Indoctrination always happens in a group — so where is this group?” he said.
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