Colleen LaRose AKA "Jihad Jane" Pleads Not Guilty

"Jihad Jane" Pleads Not Guilty To Terror Charges


The Philadelphia-area woman who authorities say dubbed herself "Jihad Jane" online pleaded not guilty Thursday in federal court to a four-count indictment charging her in an overseas terrorist plot.

Colleen LaRose, 46, of Pennsburg, appeared in court wearing a green jumpsuit and corn rows in her blond hair. A May 3 trial date was set.

She was accused of conspiring with jihadist fighters and pledging to commit murder in the name of a Muslim holy war. Authorities say she wanted to kill a Swedish artist who had offended Muslims.

Authorities say she grew acquainted online with violent co-conspirators from around the world. They say she posted a YouTube video in 2008 saying she was "desperate to do something" to ease the suffering of Muslims.

She was arrested in October 2009 in Philadelphia while returning to the United States.

LaRose spent most of her life in Texas, where she dropped out of high school, married at 16 and again at 24, and racked up a few minor arrests.

After a second divorce, she followed a boyfriend to Pennsylvania in about 2004 and began caring for his father while he worked long hours, sometimes on the road. In 2005, she swallowed a handful of pills in a failed suicide attempt, telling police she was upset over the death of her father — but did not want to die.

As she moved through her 40s without a job or any outside hobbies, her boyfriend said, she started spending more time online.

Slipped sideways




Though her boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, did not consider her religious, and she apparently never joined a mosque, LaRose had by 2008 declared herself "desperate" to help suffering Muslims in a video she posted on YouTube.

"In my view, she sort of slipped sideways into Islam. ... There may have been some seduction into it, by one or more people," said Temple University psychologist Frank Farley.

LaRose and Gorman shared an apartment with his father in Pennsburg, a quaint if isolated town an hour northwest of Philadelphia.

Just days after the father died last August, she stole Gorman's passport and fled to Europe without telling him, making good on her online pledge to try to kill in the name of Allah, according to the indictment.

From June 2008 through her Aug. 23, 2009, departure, the woman who also called herself "Fatima Rose" went online to recruit male fighters for the cause, recruit women with western passports to marry them, and raise money for the holy war, the indictment charged.

She had also agreed to marry one of her overseas contacts, a man from South Asia who said he could deal bombs and explosives, according to e-mails recovered by authorities.

He also told her in a March 2009 e-mail to go to Sweden to find the artist, Lars Vilks.

"I will make this my goal till i achieve it or die trying," she wrote back, adding that her blonde American looks would help her blend in.

Vilks questioned the sophistication of the plotters, seven of whom were rounded up in Ireland last week, just before LaRose's indictment was unsealed. Still, he said he was glad LaRose never got to him. Although she had written the Swedish embassy in March 2009 to ask how to obtain residency, and joined his online artists group in September, there is no evidence from court documents that she ever made it to Sweden. Instead, she was arrested returning to Philadelphia on Oct. 15.

Some terrorism experts wonder if LaRose posed any serious threat to Vilks or the United States — or was simply a lost soul.

"People in distress blame the government, and now blaming the government means taking the side of these Muslim terrorists," said Ian Lustick, a University of Pennsylvania political science professor. "They're about as jihadist as you and me, but they're a lot less happy."




"Jihad Jane" Is Said To Have Confessed


The Montgomery County woman who calls herself "JihadJane" has confessed to the FBI about her alleged role in a plot to kill a Swedish cartoonist, according to two people close to the investigation.

Colleen LaRose confessed to FBI agents shortly after her October arrest at Philadelphia International Airport, where she had just arrived from London, said the two sources, who spoke on conditon of anonymity.

LaRose, 46, whose arrest was kept quiet until related arrests last week in Ireland, is scheduled to be arraigned this morning at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia.

A federal law enforcement source said LaRose's travels to Europe had included a visit with alleged coconspirators in Ireland.

Additional details of what LaRose told the FBI could not be learned yesterday. The lawyers in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams and Assistant Public Defender Mark Wilson, declined to comment.

LaRose is likely to follow routine legal procedure today during her arraignment and plead not guilty. Such a plea would not preclude a negotiated plea agreement; it would simply mark the start of formal court proceedings against LaRose.

Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys are expected to take questions after the hearing, so hope is slim that more will emerge about LaRose's life before a judge decides whether to keep her in federal custody, where she has been since her arrest.

That has done little to contain interest in the case, which was revealed when LaRose's indictment was unsealed March 9.

Today's hearing has been moved into a large federal courtroom to accommodate anticipated demand for seats. Yesterday, LaRose's case came up in two hearings by different subcommittees of the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Rep. Charles W. Dent (R., Pa.), a member of both subcommittees, said the FBI had briefed him about the woman, who posted dozens of pro-Taliban screeds on YouTube and elsewhere from near an office Dent maintains in "the quaint, front-porch town of Pennsburg."

Dent, from Allentown, would not say much about how LaRose's case might go, but he said she had talked to government investigators.

"My understanding is that the cooperation has generally stopped at this point," Dent said in a telephone during a break in the hearings. "I'm not sure they're going to get much out of her going forward."

After today's scheduled arraignment, the back-and-forth of criminal procedure will likely begin to draw out more information about how LaRose's rough life allegedly led her to join a terrorist assassination scheme.

To date, public records and acquaintances have offered gritty sketches. After two divorces and some minor scrapes with the law, LaRose lived with her parents in the early 2000s in a trailer that shared a lot with a radio transmitter for KDFT-AM, a Christian station in Ferris, Texas.

The trailer was radio-station property. The station's engineer, Cecil Wilkinson, lived there with his family, including LaRose, whose mother Wilkinson married when LaRose was 4, according to a newspaper obituary.

Ted Sauceman, who was Wilkinson's manager at the station and who, as a minister, officiated at Wilkinson's funeral, said LaRose had lived with her stepfather, mother, and adult sister in the trailer for several years.

"Religion had nothing to do with it," said Sauceman, who managed the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart's network of radio stations in the 1980s. Wilkinson "was just an engineer, and he worked wherever there was a place. That's what engineers do."

When Wilkinson died in 2005, LaRose had already moved north to Pennsburg, where she lived with boyfriend Kurt Gorman. Reeling from his death a month later, LaRose took a handful of muscle relaxers after getting drunk and called her family in Texas, who sent police to help.

Her mother, whom KDFT allowed to live in the trailer after Wilkinson's death, eventually moved to Pennsylvania with LaRose, Sauceman said. After that, the station had the trailer demolished, and their Texas acquaintances lost track of the family.

LaRose's checkered life in Pennsylvania, where she lived with Gorman, included several minor convictions, starting in 2002. She lived an isolated life while Gorman traveled for work, helping care for two ailing Gorman family members, said a Gorman relative who spoke on condition of anonymity.

She also ventured online, with voluminous commentary openly attempting to connect with the Taliban and its sympathizers. Then, after the couple traveled to Amsterdam, Gorman's father died, and she abruptly moved out - taking, authorities say, Gorman's passport.

The next month, she traveled to Ireland for two weeks, where she allegedly met with others organizing a plot against the Swedish artist who published a caricature of the prophet Muhammad, said people familiar with the investigation. She carried the stolen passport and a belief that she, as a slight white woman, would "blend in with many people" in Europe.

But back home, authorities - tipped off by members of the Jawa Report, a forum for civilians concerned about Islamic terrorism - had begun tracking LaRose's Web commentary and her movements.

Her arrest in Philadelphia was kept quiet, and the subsequent indictment's allegations of terrorism were sealed, until authorities in Ireland could round up her suspected conspirators.

Seven were arrested there, including another American, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez of Colorado. Five have since been released.

Two men, an Algerian and a Libyan, were charged in a hearing late Monday with minor offenses that will keep them in custody. LaRose's case was not mentioned in that hearing, according to news reports.


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Sources: MSNBC, Philly Inquirer, CNN, Google Maps