On the quiet streets of Charleroi, a bleak industrial city in southern Belgium, residents are in a state of shock. Just as the city was starting to recover from playing unwitting host to the crimes of the child murderer Marc Dutroux, it woke on Thursday to news of another horror.

Muriel Degauque, a pretty blonde 38-year-old brought up in a modest redbrick house in the shadows of the coal tip, had become the first European female suicide bomber. Her parents, a crane driver and hospital secretary, had known nothing of her violent mission.

On November 9 Degauque detonated explosives she had strapped to her body in an attempt to wipe out a convoy of American soldiers north of Baghdad. According to conflicting reports, she either killed six people or succeeded merely in blowing up herself.

Early last Wednesday, after being informed by police, her mother Liliane knocked on her best friend’s door in tears. “I’ve lost my daughter,” she wept. “I now have no children.”

There were more tears as residents of the social housing complex where Muriel spent her formative years struggled to understand how the little girl who had played with their children had chosen to end her life so brutally in the name of jihad.

“I feel sick when I think about it,” said one. “It’s so sad for all her old friends and I can’t imagine what it must be like for her parents,” said another.

Serge Beghin, a local councillor, knew her well as a child. Muriel had celebrated her first communion with his sister and he had been in her brother’s class at school. “She was just like all the other girls, dreaming I suppose about becoming a teacher or a nurse,” he said.

In fact, the general consensus in Charleroi was of a “lovely, good little girl” who adored to play in the snow. She had, it was said, perhaps fallen in with a bad crowd in her adolescent years.

Andrea Dorange, who had known Muriel from the age of five, said: “She was an adorable little girl, smiling all the time. But then, later, everything became . . . different. She was really weak and very easily influenced.”

By the time she had left school at 16, Muriel was experimenting with drugs and often running away from home, one time disappearing to the hilly Ardennes region 100 miles away without her parents’ knowledge. One neighbour recalled how she had found Degauque sleeping on the doorstep of the local community centre, having spent the night out in the open.

Like some teenagers, she had a turbulent and distant relationship with her parents, who found her difficult to control. She was pretty, her mother says, and so popular with boys she wasn’t even sure how many boyfriends she’d had.

Those who knew her best believe a defining moment was the death of her brother in a motorbike accident in 1989. Jean-Paul Degauque died on his 24th birthday when a car crashed into him after running past a stop sign.

It was Muriel who had to break the news to her parents, and friends say the family never quite recovered from his death.