Ex-cop: My guilt over White Widow terrorist
DETECTIVE’S AGONY AT PROBE ERRORS
AN ex-detective has told of his guilt at failing to jail the terrorist known as the White Widow.
Former Scotland Yard counter-terror expert David Videcette said Samantha Lewthwaite, believed responsible for some 400 deaths worldwide, fooled top police chiefs by claiming innocence.
The detective interviewed the widow in the days after her suicide-bomber husband Germaine Lindsay murdered 26 people on a Tube train in London.
He said: “She beat us, we couldn’t prosecute her, we tried and we failed.”
Mr Videcette said he had his suspicions that Lewthwaite was a terrorist from the start of the investigation but his bosses did not back his hunch.
Now he says he has to live with the guilt of the deaths after her suspected involvement in attacks at a bar in
Mombasa and a mall in Nairobi. He added: “I really pressed hard to have her arrested. I wanted her on a suspect list.
“Sadly the senior investigating officer felt there wasn’t enough evidence to proceed and that the Crown Prosecution Service was going to say no, and I massively regret that she gets this opportunity to kill other people.
“Of course I think about it every single day and when you look at what happened in Mombasa she beat us, we couldn’t prosecute her. We tried and we failed.”
Lewthwaite was born to Christian parents in Banbridge, Co Down, in 1983. Her father was a British soldier, but by the age of 17 Lewthwaite had converted to Islam. It came after her parents separated in 1994.
She was said to have been badly affected by the break-up and sought solace from Muslim neighbours, who she believed had a stronger family network.
The 36-year-old adopted the Muslim name Sherafiyah at the time of her conversion and later met her husband, Lindsay, at a Stop the War march in London.
The couple, inset, married in 2002 but three years later, on July 7, 2005, Lindsay blew himself up on a train travelling between King’s Cross and Russell Square stations. He was part of a group of four suicide bombers who killed 52 people and injured 700 in one bus and three Tube attacks. Mr Videcette said: “She played like, ‘I am just the wife’. “But very quickly we could get a bit of an idea that some of the stories people like Samantha Lewthwaite were telling us, probably weren’t true.”
The ex-detective, speaking on the Netflix documentary series World’s Most Wanted, said Lewthwaite waited a week to report her husband missing. He said: “She named the child that was born after the bombing, Shahid... an honorific term for a martyr.”