CALM, composed and showing no sign of remorse, a 35-year-old Iraqi woman recounted on Jordanian television last night how she and her husband planned a double suicide bomb attack on a wedding reception in the Radisson SAS Hotel in Amman last Wednesday.

Sajida Mubarak al-Rishawi’s husband succeeded in blowing himself up and killing at least 23 guests, including the bride’s father and father-in-law. But she survived, and was arrested yesterday after al-Qaeda — apparently unaware that she was still alive — issued a statement boasting that four bombers, including a husband-and-wife team, had carried out the bombings.

“I came to Jordan with my husband on November 5, 2005, and we were both travelling on fake Iraqi passports,” al-Rishawi said in a dramatic one-minute interview filmed at the Jordanian intelligence service’s headquarters.

“We came to Jordan to carry out a mission in hotels . . . We rented a flat. My husband had two explosives belts with him, so he took mine out and started teaching me how to use it, how to wear it and how to pull the detonator.”

Last Wednesday evening “we stopped a taxi, and drove to the hotel. I went to one corner and he went to another. Inside there was a wedding party, with lots of men, women and children. My husband detonated his belt successfully.

“I tried to detonate mine but it did not work, so I went out, running along with the crowd,” she said.

At that point in the interview al-Rishawi stood up, opened her dark denim jacket and turned around to show the explosives belt — a plastic package and coil, with some grey plaster strips wrapped around it. She also showed the detonator, which was placed inside a plastic bag. She also clicked on the detonator, to show how it is usually pulled.

The intervew was cut to barely a minute lest it compromise the investigation. But officials who had seen al-Rishawi after her arrest said that she was “totally composed, talking out of conviction, and showing no feelings of guilt”.

Al-Rishawi’s television confession came a few hours after Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s Deputy Prime Minister, had called a press conference to announce her arrest.

He said that al-Rishawi was the wife of Ali Hussein al-Shammari, 35, and the sister of a former senior lieutenant to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who is leading the Iraq insurgency and who has claimed responsibility for the Amman bombings. Her brother was killed by US troops this year in the former rebel stronghold of Fallujah.

Dr Muasher also identified the two other suicide bombers who attacked the Hyatt and Days Inn hotels in Amman last Wednesday as Rawad Jassem Mohammed Abed and Safaa Mohammed Ali, both 23 and Iraqi.

The bombers, who killed 57 people, all came from Iraq’s volatile, Sunni-dominated western desert province of Anbar, bordering Jordan. After a 12-hour car journey to Amman they rented a flat, for a month, in the middle-class suburb of Tla al-Ali, a ten-minute drive from all three target hotels.

To avoid the attention of Jordan’s notoriously efficient security forces, they left the flat only on the day of the attack, and avoided contact with Jordanians.

Al-Rishawi and her husband arrived at the Radisson wearing formal clothes so that they blended in with the guests and the wedding party. But they both had belts concealed beneath their clothes packed with 5kg to 10kg of explosives and ballbearings to cause maximum damage.

According to Dr Muasher, Rishawi’s husband “pushed her out of the ballroom” when her belt failed to detonate, then returned and blew himself up.

She might have escaped detection had not al-Zarqawi’s organisation, al-Qaeda in Iraq, posted a statement on the internet last Friday claiming that four Iraqis, including a married couple, carried out the attacks.

Initially, Jordanian intelligence officers denied that a married couple were involved, saying that they had recovered only the bodies of three male bombers.

The al-Qaeda statement apparently made them rethink. “There were leads that more people had been involved, but it was not clear that it was a woman and we had no idea on her nationality,” one official said.

Al-Rishawi is expected to appear in a Jordanian court where she will face the death penalty if convicted.

King Abdullah of Jordan, who released al-Zarqawi from jail in 1999 as part of a general amnesty, told CNN yesterday: “To walk into the lobby of a hotel, to see a wedding procession and to take your spouse with you into that wedding and blow yourself up — these people are insane.”

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