By Mia Shanley
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - The father-in-law of the man named as Stockholm's suicide bomber said on Friday his daughter had known nothing of the plan in advance and said the attacker's death was "not regretted."
Ali Thwany said in an email sent to some media he had limited contact with his daughter Mona or her late husband, Taimour Abdulwahab. But he was certain she had not been involved.
"She was deceived and she has nothing to do with it," he wrote in Arabic in an email after Reuters contacted him.
"She did not know about her criminal husband's movements or his secret plans... He did not tell her about his personal affairs or his relations or his dubious travels."
The 28-year-old Abdulwahab, who lived in Sweden in the 1990s before relocating to Britain, is believed to have been killed in a botched attack on downtown Stockholm on Saturday after a bomb belt he was wearing went off prematurely.
Police believe he was preparing to attack a train station or department store at the height of the Christmas shopping season.
Thwany said in the email his daughter was scared of her husband and suspicious of his movements, though she chose to keep quiet.
"In the name of my family I announce that I know nothing about anything concerning the criminal (Abdulwahab) ... and this has been the case for more than three years," he said, signing the email with the title architect, researcher and university professor.
He said his daughter now regretted her silence.
"(His death) is not regretted. On the contrary I see it as setting my daughter free from the claws of deception and brainwashing and terror of (losing) God's grace according to their religious beliefs," he added.
Abdulwahab was a father of three who spent most of his teens in Tranas, one of the towns in Sweden which experienced a wave of immigration from war-torn countries such as Iraq and Bosnia.
He left Sweden after graduating from high school to study sports therapy in Luton, a large town some 30 miles (50 km) north of London.
Investigators examining Europe's first fatal bombing by a suspected Islamist militant since 2007 are looking into the possibility the bomber may have had accomplices.
Shortly before the blasts, Swedish news agency TT received an email with an attached sound file which criticised Sweden's deployment of troops in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, as well as caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad by a Swedish artist that angered Muslims in 2007.
