How 7/7 bomber’s Home Counties widow became the world’s most wanted woman
As anti-terror police find bizarre pictures hidden on her computer, the Mail goes to Kenya to investigate ...
WITH the tourist season about to begin, this is usually a busy spell for hotels and restaurants along the beaches of Kenya’s breathtaking coastline. But not this year: these are dangerous times in paradise.
‘We have no people,’ sighs George Otieno, a hotel manager in Mombasa, as he surveys a deserted beach once popular with tourists from Britain, the U.S. and Germany. ‘It’s a disaster.’
The culprit? Samantha Lewthwaite, also known as the White Widow — a 28-year- old university graduate from England’s Home Counties who is rapidly assuming the mantle of the world’s most infamous female al Qaeda killer, after secretly basing herself on Kenya’s coast.
Details of Lewthwaite’s extraordinary journey from an ordinary childhood in Buckinghamshire — her father was a British soldier, her mother a housewife — emerged last week as Scotland Yard terror squad detectives and the CIA reportedly launched a desperate hunt to find her.
It is claimed that Lewthwaite, whose late husband was one of the 7/7 suicide bombers, is targeting tourist bars and hotels in East Africa.
She is even said to have fired rocket-propelled grenades in the latest attack three weeks ago.
‘Samantha isn’t a small cog – she has links to the top’ ‘We’ll shoot her dead if we find her and she runs’
So grim has the situation become in Kenya, where the White Widow’s fearsome reputation is spreading fast through towns and villages, that senior police officials are trying to downplay the threat amid a catastrophic slump in tourist bookings.
Elijah Rop, the local head of Kenya’s antiterror police, insisted to the world’s media this month: ‘We don’t know where that woman is, but I can tell you that she is not in Kenya.
‘This idea that she is firing rockets is nonsense. We cannot even say that she is someone that we fear. She is far away, she is hiding somewhere.’
His comments have been likened to the mayor in the film Jaws saying it’s safe to go back in the water. But he spoke out after the U.S. continued its warning to all citizens not to visit Kenya, because of the terror threats linked to the White Widow. And Interpol is about to issue a ‘red notice’ to international police forces, along with photos of Lewthwaite, after it emerged a computer found at one of her Mombasa homes showed she’d been trawling the internet for bomb-making tips.
Although she had smashed the laptop after her accomplices were arrested, Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism unit managed to retrieve details from the hard drive, including digital pictures of Lewthwaite that suggest she has developed a bizarre self-image.
In one, she wears a revealing vest top with her auburn hair falling over her shoulders. In a second, her face has been transposed on to a poster in New York’s Time Square, while a third features her face reproduced many times over in bubbles.
British police are also understood to have taken ammunition from Lewthwaite’s property to see if it can be linked to the murder of British tourist David Tebbutt, 58, who was shot at a Kenyan resort last September.
It seems implausible that an English mother of three young children can be one of the world’s most wanted terrorists and hold a senior role in the male-dominated ranks of al Qaeda. But, in Mombasa, I am told by the official state prosecutor overseeing the case that this far from the realms of fantasy and hype — Lewthwaite is armed and highly dangerous.
‘We found weapons and explosives at her house,’ says Jacob Ondari of Kenya’s directorate of public prosecutions. ‘ Lewthwaite is highly, highly dangerous. She is not just a small cog in this terrorist machine — she has links to the top. I will be calling for the death penalty when she is finally caught. That would be our prayer.
‘The police will shoot her if they find her and she tries to run — too bad if she gets shot dead. It’s detestable that you come into my country and kill innocent people.’
During my investigation into Lewthwaite’s activities, I was also passed documents showing that armed Kenyan police are under orders to use the ‘full force of the law’ and ‘ vigorously effect’ an arrest warrant for her.
A judge has also issued instructions for her to be arrested and brought to court on August 2, the date set for her trial to answer charges that she conspired with others to ‘cause harm to innocent citizens’.
Senior police sources are convinced the White Widow is still in Kenya and actively planning attacks with fellow Islamic fanatics. What’s more, credible witnesses tell me they saw a white woman believed to be Lewthwaite fire grenades into a crowded local bar last month — killing three people, including a nine-year- old boy, and horrifically injuring 30.
Hundreds of people were outside the Jericho Bar, watching the Euro 2012 football match between England and Italy. The first man to claim Lewthwaite was actively involved in a terrorist attack gave me a chilling account of what unfolded that day.
Isaac Simanye, 25, a security guard and parking attendant at Jericho Bar, saw two cars — a black 4x4 with tinted windows and white saloon — pull up outside and block in other vehicles.
‘I went over to tell these people to move,’ he says. ‘A white woman in an Islamic gown got out of the black car. It was strange to see a foreigner in these clothes. She shouted something to a man in the other car — he was wearing a balaclava and he got out and started hitting me and trying to get my phone in case I called for help.
‘The white woman got what looked like a long gun from the back of the car.’ She began walking backwards with a rocket- propelled grenade launcher over her shoulder. Then she started firing.
The first grenade flew over the top of the drinkers and exploded on the roof of a house nearby, killing a young boy. The second shot was on target, exploding near a group of drinkers clustered around an outside television set.
Businessman Peter Okode, who was watching the match at the bar, tells me: ‘I heard a noise I have never heard in this world — a massive explosion and then screaming and crying.
‘There were people trying to hold their intestines in, and one woman with her legs and buttocks blown off. There was blood everywhere. These were innocent men and women killed and maimed in cold blood.’
Kenya’s east coast is increasingly being used as a base for terrorists, and its porous borders and corrupt immigration officers on salaries of just £300 a month mean extremists such as Lewthwaite can easily flit in and out of the country.
To her fellow East African terrorists she is known as dada muzungu — Swahili for ‘white sister’. But ordinary people are outraged by her activities.
A police source involved in the investigation says he is furious that this ‘imported’ foreign terrorist is wreaking havoc in Kenya. ‘She is a British-made criminal and killer,’ the source tells me. ‘She grew up and went to school in England. What went wrong?
‘Is it the way British children are brought up that’s all wrong, that’s causing such rebellion? Or is it because of the British system of education?’
Perhaps only Lewthwaite can answer that question. But there are scant clues in her upbringing that she would one day become a jihadist for a Somali wing of al Qaeda.
Fragments of her life story first emerged after the Tube and bus bombings in London in 2005. One of the four suicide bombers who killed 52 people was Samantha’s husband Jermaine Lindsay, with whom she had two children — including a baby born two months after the atrocity.
Lewthwaite’s father Andrew was serving in the British Army in Northern Ireland in the Seventies when he met her mother Christine. They had three children, with Samantha being the youngest. She grew up in Aylesbury, Bucks, after her father left the Army and moved the family to England.
Her parents separated when she was 11, which badly affected her, according to her friends. It is understood she became friendly with Muslim neighbours during this difficult time. When she was 15 and working on an A-level in religious studies, she decided to convert to Islam, and began wearing a hijab instead of her jeans and T-shirts.
She met Lindsay via an internet chat room while she was studying for a degree in politics at the University of London’s prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies.
Afterwards she said: ‘I just wanted to find a Muslim husband and settle down. When we got together we were fantastic and prayed five times a day together.’ In 2004, the couple got married in an Islamic ceremony in the front room of a terrace house in Aylesbury.
None of her family attended. She said later: ‘My father Andy didn’t approve and stayed away. I was his youngest daughter. He found it hard enough when I converted to Islam, [let alone] marrying a Muslim I’d hardly met.’
After the 7/7 bombings Lewthwaite branded her husband’s actions ‘abhorrent’, and the police said she was an innocent party.
It’s not known what happened during the next three years to persuade her to leave England and join a terror group in East Africa — where she is thought to have been put in charge of financing atrocities.
But what is certain is that since joining al Qaeda in 2008, Lewthwaite has led a charmed life, giving birth to a third child from a new relationship, and narrowly escaping capture twice in the past four years.
The first time was when she was travelling on a bus from Kenya to Somalia with other Islamic extremists late in 2008. Dressed from head to toe in Islamic robes, she was with another terror suspect, Jermaine Grant from East London, who had also moved to Kenya. He had disguised himself as a woman by wearing a burqa.
The British pair were on the bus with Saleh Nabhan, the mastermind behind two of East Africa’s worst terror atrocities: the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 250, and the 2002 attempt to bring down an Israeli airline with Stinger missiles. The fact he was travelling with the White Widow underlines how highly trusted she had become.
The following year, Nabhan — a Kenyan with direct links to terror commanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan — was killed by a U.S. drone. It was considered a major blow to alShabaab, the Somali wing of al Qaeda.
The bus was stopped by police officers but Lewthwaite was not yet known to them, and she hid behind an
Islamic veil, then continued on her way to the Somali border.
Grant and other terrorists were arrested and taken to a police compound in Dadajabula. But they escaped a few hours later when 20 Islamic militants with AK-47 assault rifles stormed the compound. Lewthwaite and Grant regrouped in Mombasa, renting three separate properties. At one of them Lewthwaite dressed as a Westerner. But at another flat in an Islamic ghetto, she only went outside covered from head to toe in Islamic clothes. Clearly, the intent was to confuse police.
What is also extraordinary is that Lewthwaite is thought to have her children with her on the run. Indeed, Kenyan police found a diary at one of her safe houses that revealed she planned to bring them up as future Islamic terrorists. Grant, 29, managed to evade further arrest until December last year, when Kenyan police received a tip-off while investigating a series of explosions around tourist hotels in Mombasa.
They smashed down the doors of a luxury villa used by Grant and Lewthwaite — presumably rented with funds provided by al-Shabaab — and found automatic rifles and boxes of ammunition.
The villa was also a bomb-making factory. Hidden in the sewage system were drums of chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide and ammonium nitrate — the components her suicide bomber husband used to kill 26 people on the Piccadilly Line on 7/7.
Police also found Lewthwaite’s diary in the house, which detailed how wives of suicide bombers should be ‘devoted’, because life would be ‘sweeter in the hereafter’ since they married a ‘ mujahideen’. For the past seven months, Grant has been held inside the Kenyan penal system, where food is one meal a day and accommodation is a cell holding up to 100 prisoners. Once fit and cocky, he is now a shadow of his former self.
After being interrogated for days, he betrayed Lewthwaite as his partner in crime, revealing that she was the ‘financier’ of the terror cell.
He even told police the address of a house in Bakarani — an Islamic fundamentalist stronghold outside Mombasa where police rarely enter for fear of attack — where Lewthwaite had taken refuge.
Officers raided it but, oddly, let Lewthwaite go. Police say she insisted she was just a tourist, and they had no proof against her.
Yet last week I was told that Lewthwaite had a bag ‘full of money’ — thought to be up to £50,000 in
She escaped into Somalia hidden
under a veil
cash — when the police raided. A different set of officers returned three days later, but she had vanished.
Police believe the terror cell was just days away from bombing hotels popular with British tourists, including the Serena Beach Hotel, and a nearby shopping centre.
Now Lewthwaite is believed to be using a new forged passport — she had been travelling on a stolen one belonging to Natalie Webb, a nurse from Essex. Senior sources in Kenya believe she remains highly active here, and has passed in and out of the country to Somalia.
The Jericho Bar carnage suggests she is willing to risk everything to come back into Kenya and carry out attacks near the safe houses she once used. Clearly, the combined might of the CIA, Scotland Yard and Kenya Police has done nothing to diminish her appetite for terror.
If Samantha Lewthwaite is taken alive and convicted, she will face a death sentence. If she is lucky, it will be commuted to life imprisonment by a lenient judge. If not, she will die by the hangman’s noose.
Either way, there is no way back for the White Widow, late of Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, and now lurking in East Africa plotting further bloodshed and pain. Additional reporting: Rebecca Evans in London