Love, Jihadi Style

Sun, May 20, 2007 at 1:48:28 pm PDT

Australian Jill Courtney was smitten with Hussan Kalache, and to prove her love she vowed to do anything he asked—including blowing up a car bomb in Sydney’s nightclub district.

SYDNEY (AFP) - An Australian woman planned to explode a car bomb in Sydney’s main nightlife district to prove her love for her jailed boyfriend, a court was told Thursday.

Jill Courtney, 27, was “obsessed” with Hussan Kalache, who had promised to marry her if she carried out a “mission”, police said in a statement presented in court. They said she had Kalache’s name and prison number tattooed “over various parts of her body,” and that he had wanted Courtney to “prove her love to him by undertaking a ‘mission’ before he would commit to marriage.”

She was ordered to stand trial on charges of conspiring to commit murder and place explosives in a public place. The police said Courtney denied the allegations. According to the statement, a tip-off that a car-bomb would explode in the Kings Cross area in Sydney on March 24 last year led them to Courtney, who lived with her father.

Investigations revealed she and Kalache, now 28, were in a “turbulent” relationship and she was obsessed with marrying him. “During (one) conversation Kalache states that after the ‘mission’ is completed he will marry the accused immediately,” the statement said.