Jerusalem Woman Bomber Identified

The first woman suicide bomber was identified Wednesday, January 30, as a Palestinian called Wafa Idris, 28, divorcee, who lived in the Al Amri refugee camp near Ramallah on the West Bank and worked as a volunteer worker with the Red Crescent. An arm of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah, the Al Aqsa Brigades, now claims to have sent her to blow herself up on a busy thoroughfare in central Jerusalem last Sunday, June 27, killing one Israeli and injuring 160.
Immediately after the attack, Palestinian sources identified her as a student at al Najah University in Nablus called Shahinez al Amouri. Hizballah television station called her Shahinez al-Souri – which is not a Palestinian name. The university denied having either name on its rolls.
Seconds before the blast, the bomber went into a shoe shop and speaking Arabic asked the price of a pair of shoes and left. The shop was completely destroyed. debkafile raised a number of hypotheses to account for the anomalies and the failure of any Palestinian terrorist organization to come forward immediately after the attack to trumpet the “martyr’s” full identity – routine after a terror strike on the scale of Sunday’s Jerusalem bombing. Yet another anomaly was the time lag of four days before the announcement came. Even now, some sources call her Wafa Idris and some Wafa Halil.
The unusual features of this attack have provoked lively speculation and a broader than usual investigation by the security authorities which have still not corroborated the tardy Fatah claim.