Hasna Aitboulahcen (12 August 1989-18 November 2015) was a female member of the Islamic State from France. She was the cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud and died alongside him in a police raid on the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris. Aitboulahcen was believed to have been the first female suicide bomber in Europe, said to have killed a police dog by detonating a suicide belt, but it was later discovered that the suicide bomber was a male, Chakib Akrouh.
Biography[]
Hasna Aitboulahcen was born on August 12th, 1989 in Clichy-la-Garenne (a suburb of Paris, France) to a family of Sunni Muslim Moroccans that arrived in 1973 and she was the cousin of Abdelhamid Abaaoud. She used to wear cowboy hats and was not religious, and she lived in Creutzwald, near Metz. She drank alcohol and was an extrovert, but she later became radicalized, taking pictures of herself with an assault rifle while also praising Hayat Boumeddiene, the wife of terrorist Amedy Coulibaly. She was involved with drug running as the director of the Beko Construction building firm (set up in 2011) in Epinay-sur-Seine, which was believed to be a drug front. Later, she attempted to go to fight in the Syrian Civil War after going through Turkey, but she failed and instead pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and promised to launch an attack in France. She only started wearing a headscarf in October 2015 and had never read the Qur'an.
On November 18 2015, French police raided their apartment in the Saint-Denis suburb of Paris, and Aitboulahcen, her cousin, and five other people resisted the counterterrorist police, as they were about to launch an attack. Police twice asked where her "boyfriend" (Abdelhamid) was, and she twice shouted "He's not my boyfriend!", with a suicide belt detonating shortly after. The explosion took down the floor above her, and it killed a police dog named "Diesel". Her spine was found on the street near the apartment as a result of the huge explosion, and the explosion may have been partly responsible for injuring five policemen. It was initially believed that she was the bomber, and this would have made her Europe's first female suicide bomber. However, it was later determined that the suicide bomber was a male named Chakib Akrouh, and that she had been killed in this explosion.