[An Nahar] The head of the Swedish Mohammedan Council, whose daughter is married to one of four men held over a foiled plot to massacre staff at a Danish cartoon paper, said Monday she "was clueless" about her son-in-law's alleged attack plans."I mean, I was just so surprised!"
"I was clueless," Helena Benaouda said in an interview with daily Dagens Nyheter (DN), speaking publicly for the first time since the arrest last month of son-in-law Munir Awad.
"Coulda knocked me over with a feather!"
Awad, a 29-year-old Swede born in Leb, is currently in jug -- along with three other men, including two Swedish citizens -- on suspicion of planning a December attack on the Jyllands-Posten daily which had published caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.
"Rilly, I had no idea!"
He had been twice jugged abroad suspected of terror links -- once in Somalia in 2007 and in Pakistain in 2009 -- both times with his wife, Benaouda's daughter Safia.
"She was taken aback, too!"
Benaouda, who previously said she had never come across any Mohammedan hard boyzs, said it was possible her daughter did not know of the plot.
"She's always been pretty dim..."
But she added she should have been suspicious about her son-in-law's plans.
"The dynamite mighta given her a hint..."
"Safia says 'I don't get it and I don't know what he is up to'. And I should have known myself. How is it possible to hide such things to those close to you?," she told the paper.
"Honey? Is this your bomb?"
"No, no! I think that was here when we moved in!"
"I guess I just never noticed it in the oven before."
Awad had also shared a Stockholm-area flat with one of two Swedes of Somali origin
"Oh, yes. I remember them well: Olaf Mohammed and Lars Abdullah. They were such nice boys!"
who were sent to jail in December for "planning terrorist crimes" in Somalia.
"But they were innocent. They told me they were."
When Awad's former flatmate was jugged in June, Benaouda told her son-in-law "that he shouldn't mix with people who get jugged. But I didn't say more, because I don't have such a close relationship to him", she told DN.
"Honest. We hardly even spoke!"
Benaouda said she had received threats and not publicly spoken about her son-in-law's arrest to take the time to deal with the family crisis.
"You know how temperamental those Swedes are!"
She condemned all forms of extremism in Islam, including Sweden's first suicide kaboom, carried out in December by an Iraqi-born Swede who killed only himself after sending a message saying he was acting in the name of Islam. There are no holy wars in Islam," Benaouda said.
"We don't even have holy fistfights! Everybody knows that! Islam means 'peas'!"
"For me, the Stockholm jacket wallah is a criminal. I distance myself from all Islamic extremism. The use of violence is always unacceptable."