I was drugged, strapped with a bomb: Iraqi girl

Says she was served apricot juice and forced to wear vest

BAGHDAD (Reuters)

Rania is only 15-years old, but in the past week the softly spoken Iraqi girl has been drugged, strapped with explosives, arrested by men she nearly blew up and then shoved into a detention centre.

Rania, who has been described by U.S. military officials as an "unwilling" suicide bomber, says she never wanted to be a martyr and says she was forced to nearly blow herself to pieces.

Police officers remove the explosive vest (Courtesy Reuters)

"My husband took me to see some of his relatives I'd not seen before. I stayed the night. ... Then, in the morning, they brought me breakfast with apricot juice. It tasted funny, so I asked what was in it. They told me 'nothing, just drink'."

Police, who arrested the teenage girl on Sunday in the violent Diyala province, said she seemed drugged by a sedative.

"I was feeling dizzy and sick for days," she says.

After breakfast, an older woman who claimed to be a cousin of her husband started to put the vest on her, Rania said. She protested, but they told her not to worry. She must just go to a busy local market, where they would meet her. She was suspicious but they were older and very persuasive.

Her husband was in another room. Rania did as she was told.

Before she left the house, her husband reappeared by the door. He stopped her and asked her: "If we meet in the next life, will you choose me or another man." She was unnerved by the question, but she joked: "I'd choose another man."

She hasn't seen him since.

Rania never got to the market. At a security checkpoint, a local neighborhood patrol was suspicious of her long robe and searched her, finding wires then the explosive vest.

"I never intended to blow myself up. When stopped at the checkpoint, I wanted to turn myself in, but I was afraid," she says. "Nobody told me how to use this vest. I don't know if they meant to blow me up by remote control. I just don't know."

Police are seeking her husband.

"The fact he's not shown up to help me yet shows he must have something to hide," she says.

Rania's profile matches that of other female suicide bombers in Iraq. Her father and brother both disappeared in 2006, she says, at the height of Iraq's vicious sectarian conflict. Their bodies turned up weeks later.

"My father disappeared and my mother found his body in the morgue; they dumped my brother's body in the river," she said, as she sat on her cell bed, wrapped in a long black cloak.

Analysts say many suicide bombers are motivated by a thirst for revenge for family members killed.