May 9, 2006: Published!

The woman who committed, or at least tried to commit, the suicide bombings in Jordan last year has finally been assigned a lawyer. It has taken months, largely due to the outcry from the public that she be denied this right due to the nature of her crime. She and her husband entered a hotel in which a wedding was taking place with explosives strapped to their bodies and detonated them killing himself and several wedding guests. Although she tried to detonate her explosives, they didn’t go off and she was taken into custody. The government, however, feeling that she could not be deprived of a proper defense, appointed her a lawyer today. Yesterday, I went along with one of the reporters to his interview so I could get a photo—the first to be published in the paper. Maybe not the most interesting shot, but it was more difficult than I thought it would be to catch the right expression. We didn’t want him to appear happy, indifferent, upset, incompetent, or mean, which was the range of expressions that filled up my memory card. Plus, with Arabic being such a guttural language, it seemed like he constantly had his mouth open.

Despite the heinous nature of her crime, I can’t help feeling sorry for the woman on trial. Did she really know what she was doing? An Iraqi by birth, she told the Jordan authorities that she thought she was coming to Jordan to get married. At 35 years of age she has the education level of a sixth grader and claims that she had no knowledge of the attacks prior to having her husband (of two weeks) lace her with explosives a half an hour before they entered the hotel. Obviously, the husband and the other men had been planning these attacks for some time, but she was given a half an hour to mentally prepare herself for ending her life. I wonder if she felt like her husband was killing her. Or, did she reason to herself that death was the best option considering she would be a widow of a murderer with no family in a foreign land?