A 50-year-old Pennsylvania woman who dubbed herself “Jihad Jane” was sentenced to ten years in jail Monday after telling a federal judge she was “in a trance” when she plotted to kill a Swedish artist.
But Colleen LaRose said she had renounced terrorism since surrendering.
“I don’t want to be in jihad no more,” she told Judge Petrese Tucker in Philadelphia.
LaRose, who had faced a life sentence, joined a 2009 conspiracy to target artist Lars Vilks because he had depicted the prophet Mohammed as a dog. Muslim extremists had offered $100,000 to anyone who killed Vilks.
Larose, of Pennsburg, Pa., told the judge she once had thought about jihad from morning to night.”I was in a trance and couldn’t see anything else,” she said.
Prosecutors depicted LaRose as a “lonely and isolated” woman who was flattered to be enlisted in a jihadist cause on-lione.
LaRose left the US to join a terror cell in Ireland but left after about six weeks because she “grew frustrated because her co-conspirators were not ready for action,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said Monday.
But her lawyer, public defender Mark Wilson, said “there’s virtually no chance that she would ever be involved in violent jihad ever again.”
Judge Tucker said she had no doubt LaRose, who stalked Vilks online, would have killed him had she had the chance.
“The fact that out of boredom, or out of being housebound, she took to the computer and communicated with the people she communicated with, and hatched this mission, is just unbelievable,” Tucker said.
LaRose returned to Philadelphia in 2009 to surrender, becoming one of the few women ever charged in the U.S. with terrorist activities. Vilks was never harmed.