Terrorism“Jihad Jane” sentenced to ten years in prison for plot to kill Swedish cartoonist

Colleen LaRose, a 50-year old Pennsylvania woman whose online name was “Jihad Jane,” yesterday (Monday) was sentenced to ten years in prison for a plot to kill a Swedish artist who, she believed, had insulted Islam.

LaRose had faced a potential life term, but Judge Petrese Tucker accepted a government request to have the sentence reduced because LaRose cooperated with the investigation.

Larose told the judge she was ‘in a trance,” thinking about jihad from morning to night. “I don’t want to be into jihad no more,” she said.

She was sentenced to ten years and five years of supervised release. She had already spent more than four years in prison.

LaRose was described as a “lonely and isolated” woman who joined the jihadist cause out of boredom.

Prosecutors said she took part in a 2009 plot to kill artist Lars Vilks over his series of drawings which depicted the Muslim prophet Muhammad as a dog.

The Huffington Post reports that the Justice Department said Ali Charaf Damache, who was living in Ireland, recruited LaRose and another U.S. woman through jihadist Web sites. Damache married the other woman, Jamie Paulin Ramirez, in a Muslim ceremony on the day she arrived in Ireland from Colorado that same month.

LaRose spent six weeks with the terror cell in Ireland, but then decided to leave because she “grew frustrated because her co-conspirators were not ready for action,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said Monday.

Williams added that others need to know that “if you plot to kill someone, you are going to receive decades behind bars — decades — even if you cooperate.”

Public defender Mark Wilson argued that LaRose has come to understand the true, peaceful tenets of Islam and said “there’s virtually no chance that she would ever be involved in violent jihad ever again.”

Judge Tucker, however, 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 left Ireland and returned to Philadelphia in 2009, where she surrendered. The Post notes that her arrest was kept secret and the indictment sealed until Paulin-Ramirez and the six other members of the terrorist cell were rounded up in Ireland months later.

Paulin-Ramirez and another co-defendant, Maryland teen Mohammad Hassan Khalid, are scheduled to be sentenced this week in Philadelphia.