Detaining a suicide attacker

December 12, 2005

From ABC news:

Belgium authorities raided homes Wednesday and detained 14 suspects with links to a terrorist network that sent volunteers to Iraq, including a Belgian woman who allegedly carried out a suicide attack in Baghdad.

So wait… the woman first carried out a suicide attack, and probably blew herself up, and was THEN detained? What the writer probably means is that the authorities raided her home, but the sentence is really obscure.

How I would rewrite it to be more clear. I understand it doesn’t really match with the newspaper/news style of “try to say as much as you can with as few words as you can”, but sometimes clarity gets axed in the process, which, if a part of your readership is non-English-native, may not be so good.

Belgium authorities raided homes Wednesday and detained 14 suspects who had links to a terrorist network that sent volunteers to Iraq. One of the raided homes belonged to a Belgian woman who allegedly carried out a suicide attack in Baghdad.