Amman, Jordan ? In a televised confession broadcast on state-run Jordanian television Sunday, Sajida Rishawi, 35, an Iraqi from the city of Fallujah, described how her husband pushed her out of a ballroom at the Radisson SAS hotel in the Jordanian capital when her contraption failed to explode. His vest detonated, and a ball of flames ripped through the crowded hall.

Rishawi modeled the suicide vest she allegedly wore to carry out the attack. She spun around, showing how hers should have worked.

Rishawi was arrested Sunday morning for allegedly taking part in suicide bombings here Wednesday that killed 57 people at three hotels and jolted a population used to relative security.

Jordanian intelligence had been tracking Rishawi since the night of the bombing, officials said, when an alert was issued that a potential suspect wearing a black dress was seen running from the scene of the Radisson bombing, where 200 people had gathered for a wedding.

Two days later, al-Qaida in Iraq, a insurgent group led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, posted a statement on its Web site claiming three men and a woman married to one of them had died carrying out the coordinated attacks that struck the Grand Hyatt, Raddison and Days Inn hotels in downtown Amman. The statement said the woman, which it did not name, “chose to accompany her husband to his martyrdom.”

But the alleged female bomber did not die.

Jordanian intelligence police arrested her Sunday morning after raiding the apartment in the Tela Ali neighborhood in Amman that her husband and the other two bombers had rented Nov. 7, intelligence sources said. The bombers entered Jordan five day earlier from Iraq with false passports, Jordan’s deputy prime minister, Marwan Muasher, said at a news conference Sunday.

Muasher said Rishawi was the sister of Mubarak Atrous Rishawi, al-Zarqawi’s top deputy in the western Iraqi province of Anbar, who was killed by U.S. forces in Fallujah.