Jihad Jane or Colleen LaRose has pleaded not guilty to terrorism in a federal court after she was charged to a four-count indictment. A fresh date of May 3rd for the trial was set. LaRose has been indicted for conspiring against the U.S in collaboration with Jihadi fighters who wanted to wage a Muslim holy war.
She was also accused of wanting to kill the Swedish artist who had made a cartoon of the Prophet. Authorities said that La Rose had links with several other terror outfits from different parts of the world. In a video posted on the YouTube in 2008 she wanted to do something desperate to help the suffering Muslims. However, she was arrested in October 2009 in Philadelphia as she returned back to the States.
LaRose has been a school drop out and spent most of her life in Texas. She was married at the age of 16. Then she married once again at the age of 24. However, after her divorce for the second time, she went to Pennsylvania in 2004 through a boyfriend of hers and started to look after his father as his boyfriend used to go out working for long hours. She had also swallowed pills as she tried to commit suicide in 2005. In her 40s she was without any job and according to her boyfriend she used to spend more time on the Internet. Kurt Gorman, who was LaRose’s boyfriend, never felt that she was religious.
LaRose, Gorman and his father stayed in an apartment in Pennsburg, a town near Philadelphia. Then as Gorman’s father died, she stole his passport and fled to Europe last August, trying to give her a role in the terrorism bid.
After June 2008 in the next one year, LaRose who was also known as "Fatima Rose" recruited male fighters for the cause, and also used women with Western passports so that both can get married and wage the holy war. According to some e-mails recovered by the authorities, Rose also married, a man from South Asia who used to deal in bombs and explosives. In the other mails recovered she does mention her plans to kill the Swedish Cartoonist, Lars Vilks, who made a cartoon of the Prophet.
"I will make this my goal till i achieve it or die trying," she wrote in the mail.
Just before LaRose's indictment, Vilks was totally unsure why somebody wanted to kill him and why a plot would be hatched against him.
