Colleen Renée LaRose (born June 5, 1963),[5] also known as Jihad Jane and Fatima LaRose, is an American citizen who was convicted and sentenced to 10 years for terrorism-related crimes, including conspiracy to commit murder and providing material support to terrorists.
[17][18][19][20] LaRose moved to the Philadelphia area in 2004 to live with her new boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, whom she had met in Ennis, Texas, when he was on a business trip.
[2][11][21][22][23] Spurred by the deaths in short order of her brother and father, LaRose apparently attempted suicide on May 21, 2005, by consuming eight to ten cyclobenzaprine pills along with alcohol.
During that period, she apparently converted to Islam and became radicalized,[2][8][22][23] however, Gorman said that she "never talked about international events, about Muslims, anything".
[2][4][27] One of her co-conspirators allegedly identified Lars Vilks as a target; the Swedish artist who had outraged some Muslims by drawing a cartoon of Muhammad.
LaRose was directed, on March 22, 2009, to go to Sweden, to find and kill Vilks to frighten "the whole Kufar [non-believer] world".
[2] The FBI contacted her and interviewed her on July 17, 2009, and she denied soliciting funds for terrorism, or using the online screen name of "JihadJane."
On September 30, she allegedly told an online co-conspirator that it would be "an honor & great pleasure to die or kill" for him, and promising that "only death will stop me here that I am so close to the target!
[4] She had begun to become disillusioned when family illness back in America led her to "pause" and return home.
In a court appearance before a federal magistrate on October 17, she agreed to pretrial detention, but did not enter a plea.
[12] United States magistrate judge Lynne Sitarski set her trial date for May 3, 2010; during the interim she remained in federal custody.
[34] She was confined to her cell often for 23 hours a day but managed to become engaged to a fellow prisoner who promised to convert to Islam upon release.
[35] The same day as the unsealing of LaRose's indictment, four men and three women in their 20s and 40s were arrested in Waterford and Cork, Ireland, in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Vilks.
[36] They reportedly included three Algerians (two of them a married couple), a Croatian Muslim convert, a Palestinian, a Libyan, and a U.S. national—Jamie Paulin Ramirez.
[29] Five of the people were released in early March 2010, while Ali Charaf Damache, a 10-year Algerian resident of Ireland, and the Libyan, Abdul Salam al-Jahani, were ordered held without bail.
[40] Some terrorism experts pointed to LaRose's apparent mental instability, arguing she was an anomaly and not representative of a trend towards women jihadists.