‘Widow’s’ R6 000 labour

Most wanted woman gave birth in luxury Joburg clinic

LONDON: The world’s most wanted woman, Samantha Lewthwaite, hired a luxury health clinic in Joburg for the birth of her fourth child, it has been revealed.

The terror suspect, nicknamed “the White Widow”, is believed to have first travelled here in 2008.

Her suicide bomber husband, Germaine Lindsay, committed the July 7, 2005 attacks in London.

Two years later, on July 24, 2010, Lewthwaite, who is now the subject of an Interpol arrest warrant, gave birth to a girl, Surajah. The baby’s father is the suspected al-Shabaab extremist Abdi Wahid.

The militant couple paid cash for use of the upmarket Genesis clinic, booking under false names.

Lewthwaite, then 26, gave her name as Asmaa Shahidah BintAndrews, while Wahid used the pseudonym Adam Omar.

The clinic in Saxonwold boasts eight private rooms with double beds, marble bathrooms and private gardens for patients.

According to staff at the clinic, Lewthwaite, a soldier’s daughter from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, UK, opted for a water birth, with her husband and three other children present.

She attended appointments prior to the birth wearing a hijab, leaving only her eyes visible, although staff said she would remove her veil once the consultations had begun.

The couple paid for an “Early Bird” deal costing R6 000, which meant they could stay for six hours after the birth, rather than the standard two nights.

On its website, the clinic says it aims to “envelop patients in luxury”.

A statement reads: “At Genesis, the environment and service is designed to make you feel comfortable, safe and enveloped in luxury, while ensuring optimum care for you and your precious newborn. The whole idea of an active birth unit is to combine the benefits of labouring and birthing outside of the pressure of a hospital environment, with the necessary advantage of having immediate and first class medical care at hand should complications arise.”

The midwife who treated Lewth- waite was quoted by the Daily Telegraph as saying Lewthwaite had described herself as a “housewife”.

She said: “She came to me quite late in her pregnancy. She said she was from the UK and had three kids already. She said she wanted a midwife-assisted delivery because that’s how they do it in the UK. She told me that (her husband) had a contract in South Africa for two years. I think she said he worked in the media. She told me she was a housewife and always had been. As I recall, she came from a broken home and that was why she converted to Islam.”

Lewthwaite was registered at four addresses in Mayfair, Johannesburg, under the name Natalie Faye Webb.

The revelations of Lewthwaite’s secret life come just days after files found on the fugitive’s laptop por- trayed her as a loving mother.

Among those snaps were pictures showing her family in the Genesis clinic, including Wahid. They are alongside the two children Lewthwaite had with Lindsay, a son, Abdullah, nine, and daughter Ruqayyah, eight.

Lewthwaite, 29, has been on the run since December 2011 after being linked to a plan to bomb luxury tourist resorts in the Kenyan coastal resort of Mombasa. She has been linked to last month’s horrific terror attack on a Nairobi shopping mall, which killed more than 70 people.

The mother of four is the subject of a manhunt by nearly 200 countries after she was named in a Red Alert by Interpol following the atrocity in Nairobi, carried out by gunmen linked to the al-Shabaab terror group.

The family pictures, taken in July 2010 and discovered by British antiterrorist investigators on a discarded computer in Kenya, reveal Lewthwaite’s softer side, but locked in the hard drive of the laptop and a memory stick, officers made more chilling discoveries. They found Lewthwaite had spent eight years researching bomb-making and searching for the deadly chemicals used to make improvised explosives devices.

And they discovered a poem she wrote praising the ideology of alQaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan by US troops in May 2011. Typed clumsily after his death, Lewthwaite proclaims her love for the terrorist chief.

She moved to South Africa in 2008 and adopted the identity of an unsuspecting young woman who had moved to the UK with her parents as a baby.

The Briton later fled the country, through Tanzania, establishing a base in Mombasa, where she is believed to have become a senior figure in alShabaab. She went into hiding in December 2011 after she convinced anti-terror police to let her go when she was arrested following a raid on an al-Shabaab cell.

Her British accomplice, Jermaine Grant, from London, is on trial in Kenya for terrorist offences.

Lewthwaite is known to her followers as “dada mzungu” – Swahili for white sister. It is claimed she has become the “trainer” of an all-female suicide bomber squad targeting Westerners in East Africa.

Her appointment was announced on a website sympathetic to alShabaab, which revealed Lewthwaite “gave her life to Allah and now she serves Allah as his female soldier in (Somalia)” where she “commands her all-female mujahid terror squad and conducts operations against the kuffar (non-Muslims)”.

Earlier this year Lewthwaite broke cover with a Twitter rant at fugitive Omar Hammadi, who has since been killed, calling him “an irritating prat”.

It stemmed from a feud involving US-born Hammadi and former allies in al-Shabaab. Hammadi dismissed Lewthwaite as “a girl in Kenya”. Lewthwaite is thought to be in hiding in Tanzania or Somalia. – Daily Mail

PAMPERED: Samantha Lewthwaite said she was an ordinary housewife.