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Hasna Ait Boulahcen was a cousine of Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the assumed mastermind of the Paris shootings. She was killed when the police stormed her apartment in Saint Denis. For more than two days, it was uniformly reported that she died from an self-ignited explosive vest in an act of suicide bombing.
Prosecutors have now announced that this is not the case. Boulahcen has been exculpated from the accusation, simply because she wore no suicide vest.
Hasna Ait Boulahcen was originally accused of being a fanatical Islamic State operative with an explosive vest strapped to her body.
The 26-year-old was embroiled in a siege with her twisted cousin Abdelhamid Abaaoud but it Paris prosecutors have now revealed her head was in fact blown off when a third man standing next to her in the St Denis flat blew himself up on Wednesday morning.
Ait Boulahcen, a suburban Parisian who had studied at university and run a building company, was heard to shout "Help me, help me!" in the seconds before her death. This raises the prospect that Ait Boulahcen was trying to give herself up – and may even have been a hostage – when she was caught in the crossfire.
Asked to explain the U-turn further tonight, the Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said: "All I can tell you is that the kamikaze was not Hasna."
The alleged suicide vest was the only indication that Boulahcen was in any way involved in the criminal activities of her cousin. This means that her exculpation is complete, she might even have been a hostage, as the Mirror writes. It is amusing and appalling at the same time how the media savaged Boulahcen as the first European femal suicide bomber or the party girl who became a jihadist. This kitchen sink psychology reveals an intellectual blackout and is in fact a brutal calumny of a young woman who became the tragic victim of a police raid. It shows once more that the mainstream media have sqaundered their self-assumed role as the guardians of democracy.
There is no reason to believe that Hasna Boulahcen was a radical Islamist or even ready to support a terror attack. She deserves a posthumous apology from those who offended her. The Telegraph has now corrected his original story and apparently still considers her a terrorist - without any justification, however. This doesn't look like an apology.
