A female bakery worker from Charleroi in Belgium was today named by security sources as the first European woman to travel to Iraq and carry out a suicide bombing.

Muriel Degauque, 38, blew herself up in a failed attack on American soldiers on November 9 in the outskirts of Baghdad. The case has shocked the public in her home country, where she has been nicknamed the "Belgian kamikaze".

Degauque failed to injure anyone else in the bombing. Yesterday 14 people were arrested in a series of raids across Belgium, as police attempted to unravel the network of militants that smuggled her from Syria into Iraq. A further five men were arrested today.

In an interview with the French newspaper, Le Parisien, Degauque's mother, Liliane, said that her daughter's conversion to radical Islam began after she started spending more and more time with North African friends in 2000.

After a conventional upbringing in industrial southern Belgium, during which she briefly dabbled in drugs and alcohol and held a series of jobs, including as a baker's assistant, Mme Degauque said her daughter became "more Muslim than Muslim".

When she married her second husband, a Belgian of Moroccan descent, Degauque took to wearing the chador - the head-to-toe dress worn by devout Muslim women. "The religion was totally ingrained in her. She only lived for that. She had learned Arabic," her mother said.

Mme Degauque described her daughter's gradual estrangement from the rest of her family and subsequent disappearance. Mme Degauque said she suspected her daughter's involvement in the suicide bombing as soon as she heard a Belgian woman had been involved.

"I had a bad feeling," she said. "For three weeks, I had tried to call her but there was no answer."

The Prime Minister of Belgium, Guy Verhofstadt, said that Degauque's suicide and the evidence of a support network that helped her travel to Iraq suggests that Belgium is part of the network of international jihad.

"This action shows how international terrorism tries to set up networks in western European nations, recruit for terror attacks in conflict areas and look for funds to finance terrorism," he said.

Belgian police said they believed Degauque was the first Western woman to blow herself up in Iraq. Degauque's husband is believed to have died in a separate suicide attack.

"It is the first time that we see that a Western woman, a Belgian, marrying a radical Muslim, and is converted up to the point of becoming a jihad fighter," said Glenn Audenaert, Belgium's federal police director.

Belgium has had terrorist cases in the past, there are currently 13 Belgian and Moroccan nationals on trial for allegedly being members of an Islamic group suspected in recent bomb attacks in Spain and Morocco.

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