A March 12 article about the profiling of terrorists misidentified the school attended by a Canadian witness in a terrorism trial. The witness, Zenab Armend Pisheh, was a student at Carleton University of Ottawa, not Carleton College of Northfield, Minn.
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Terrorists Proving Harder to Profile
In a search of the couple's home, police said, they found radical literature, including a document titled "A Training Schedule for Committing Jihad." They also discovered a letter written by Hor in which she offered herself and their 6-month-old son as martyrs for an unspecified cause.
Hor was later arrested and charged with failing to disclose information to prevent a terrorist attack. Her husband, Yassin Nassari, 27, was charged with possessing documents for terrorism. They are scheduled to go on trial May 23 in London.
  A woman in Brussels reads news of Muriel Degauque, 38, a Catholic from the southern Belgian city of Charleroi who converted to Islam, traveled to Iraq and blew herself up in November 2005. The incident still perplexes Belgians. (2005 Photo By Geert Vanden Wijngaert -- Associated Press) |
Both had been living in Britain, but they frequently traveled back and forth to the Netherlands, authorities said. Dutch police assisted in the investigation, conducting a search of Nassari's parents' home in Eindhoven. Prosecutors have disclosed few other details.
Bart Nooitgedagt, a lawyer in Amsterdam who represents Hor, declined to answer questions about the case but said his client was innocent. "I'm pretty convinced she will be cleared of all the accusations that are being made," he said. "I cannot believe, and will not believe, that this will lead to a conviction."
In Zutphen, a town of 46,000 people alongside the Ijssel River, former neighbors and friends said they are still struggling to understand how Hor transformed so quickly from a fashion-conscious college student with a secular outlook on life into a burqa-wearing fundamentalist. "She was a modern young girl," Allal Kaddouri, a friend and owner of a pizzeria in the center of town, told the Apeldoornse Courant newspaper.
Zutphen has had a sizable immigrant population since the early 1970s, when Turks and North Africans began arriving to fill low-wage jobs in the booming Dutch economy. About one-sixth of the town is of Turkish or Arab descent.
Adriaan van Oosten, an alderman responsible for immigration issues, said there have been no overt signs of Islamic radicalism. He said civic and religious leaders met after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States to ensure that there were no problems festering under the surface. "We certainly haven't had any tensions," he said.
People who knew Hor speculated that she changed after she married her husband, whom she apparently met in London while on a study-abroad program. Jeroen Ongering, a professor at a nearby community college who taught Hor, said she was a good student but abruptly dropped out in the summer of 2003 without explanation.
"For us, we had no signal at all that there was anything wrong or amiss," Ongering said in an interview. "She was a Moroccan girl, but she was very Westernized. She knew she was a very beautiful woman. It's hard for us to understand."
