THE woman who refused to take off her burka to testify in the national court of Madrid has admitted that her brother blew himself up in Iraq.

Fátima Hssisni, from Morocco, spent two years in prison from 2006, but claims her brother told her ‘nothing’ about his plans to become a suicide bomber.

This week, she finally testified with her burka partially removed, revealing just her face, after judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez argued that religious beliefs could not be above civil law and that she was running the risk of being convicted for contempt of court.

“The great enemy of the human being is ignorance,” Fátima stated when interviewed by the press.

She said she did not know why her wearing a burka had caused so much controversy, and claimed that in other European countries its use was treated with complete normality.

Fátima was asked whether she was proud of her brother’s actions in Iraq, but believing she was still being asked about her refusal to take off her burka, she replied, “of course I am.”

But her husband intervened to clarify that she was not referring to her brother’s terrorist attack: “How could she be proud of that?”

She told the court yesterday that her brother, who was in a military training camp in Iraq with the leader of Al-Qaeda, Abu Musab Al-Zarqaui, had telephoned her and told her he was ‘going to be on television on Al-Yazira and Tele 5’.

A few months later, her family received a call from Iraq to say her brother had ‘got married’, which in fundamentalist Islamic speech means he had ‘sacrificed himself’.

She was also asked about her other brother, Ahmed Said, who had been arrested in Damascus (Syria) en route to Iraq.

“My brother didn’t explain anything to me,” Fátima stressed.

“He never talked to me about his friends.”

She also stressed she was not involved with the main suspect, Mohammed Mrabet Fashi, who is accused of indoctrinating young people and recruiting them as suicide bombers at the Al-Furkan mosque in Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona).

“I knew him because I used to shop in his butcher’s, but not personally,” reveals Fátima, who has been living in Casteldefells for 22 years with her husband, Francisco, a Spaniard who converted to Islam.

Her brother, a suicide bomber, committed a terrorist attack in Faluya (Iraq) in January 2005.