Chasing the ‘White Widow’, Samantha Lewthwaite
Charles Miranda in London
News Limited Network
September 28, 2013 12:00AM
'White Widow' Samantha Lewthwaite is feared to be behind the Nairobi shopping mall massacre. Source: Supplied
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IN the aftermath of the London 7/7 bombings in 2005, Samantha Lewthwaite would take some convincing her husband Germaine Lindsay was involved.
The then 22-year-old, who was just weeks away from giving birth to his daughter, said there was no way the “peaceful man” was the suicide bomber on the Tube’s Piccadilly Line who killed 26 people and himself in the coordinated terror strike across the British capital which claimed 52 civilian lives and injured 700 others.
Then police provided her with the forensic evidence and in, in her words, her “world collapsed”.
“The day will come when I’ll have to tell (our children) what he did,” she told the press at the time.
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She added: “I was crying when I saw people looking for family members. Obviously I didn’t know then I was linked to what I was seeing.”
If she didn’t know then she does now and eight years later it is unlikely she is shedding anything but crocodile tears as in a shopping mall in Kenya she allegedly mowed down innocent shoppers including families, all in the name of Islam.
At the time of reporting there are still mixed reports as to her alleged involvement in the atrocities at the Westgate shopping mall that has left more than 70 dead and scores injured.
But what is clear is the once British schoolgirl turned Muslim-convert grieving widow has become a terrorist wanted for a string of plots and attacks on the West in soft targets overseas. Now British authorities fear it’s all training for a bigger picture, for the woman dubbed the “White Widow” to emulate her husband’s final feat on home soil.
THE youngest of three children, Lewthwaite was born December 5, 1983 in Banbridge in Northern Ireland where her father Andy was serving with the British army in the 9th/12th Royal Lancers.
Andy had met his wife Christine Allen in Northern Ireland during a posting in the 1970s. They all lived for a time in Northern Ireland, including after Andy had left the army, but then moved to a rural corner of Britain in Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire about 70km from central London.
She was described by friends as a happy average girl, quite shy, who liked pop music and David Beckham, wearing makeup and shopping with friends and attended the co-ed The Grange secondary school.
In 1995 her parents separated, a split that devastated Lewthwaite. She took solace from her Muslim neighbours, whom she believed represented a stronger family unit.
Shortly after she began learning about the faith during religious studies lessons at school and told friends she planned to convert to Islam and within two years at the age of 17 she was wearing the Jihab gown that covered her body except for the hands and face.
A photo of a fake South African passport of Samantha Lewthwaite released by Kenyan police in December 2011.
A photo of a fake South African passport of Samantha Lewthwaite released by Kenyan police in December 2011. Source: AFP
Sometime later her face too would be covered except for her eyes. Those around her at school said the wearing of the garments had filled her with confidence and she was a changed girl. Her parents would never come to terms with her conversion and they became estranged.
She was studying for a degree in religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies at Russell Square in central London when she met the Jamaican-born fellow Muslim-convert Germaine Lindsay, an unemployed carpet layer, on an Islamic website. They arranged to meet for the first time at an anti-war rally in central London and were married within months.
There is divided opinion whether the “marriage” was arranged but an Islamic service was held in Aylesbury, under their Islamic names Asmantara and Jamal, although since it was not in a mosque or licensed venue it was never official. Her parents did not attend the ceremony.
In 2004 the couple had a son and 14 months later a daughter, she was eight months pregnant when Lindsay, then 19, detonated his backpack of explosives on the train between the Russell Square and Kings Cross Tube stations.
In 2003, prior to the bombing the family had moved back to Aylesbury.
AFTER the 7/7 bombings, Lewthwaite was at pains to point out she was clueless as to her husband’s apparent radicalisation, plot and subsequent bombing attack.
She issued several statements saying the attack was a shock to her. Her family including father, sister Sabrina and brother Allan issued a separate statement speaking of their horror of the attack and appealing for public help for information to put the full picture together.
Lewthwaite was placed by police under protective custody with fears she could be a target for a revenge attack. She later moved to northern England then disappeared resurfacing in Pakistan, South Africa then later Tanzania, Kenya and Somalia. By this stage she had very little contact with her family.
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A body, left, lies outside the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya following an attack by armed Islamic extremist group al-Shabab. Picture: AP Source: AP
It was in Pakistan she reportedly met Habib Ghani, a fanatic from Hounslow in West London. He was born to a Pakistani father and Kenyan mother and had been training in Pakistan to become a terrorist with specific skills in bomb making. She gave birth to a third child in 2009 and it was widely suspected it was Ghani’s.
Lewthwaite was by this stage also reportedly training as a terrorist and was suspected of having been involved in at least half a dozen hand grenade attacks in and around Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city. They were targeting mostly soft targets including churches, nightclubs and bars.
BY December 2011, Kenyan and British authorities suspected Lewthwaite, Ghani and other British terror suspects had become part of the terror group Al-Shabaab (loosely translated as “the youth”) a cell of al-Qaeda.
Working together, intelligence agents from both countries uncovered a Christmas terror plot by al-Shabaab to attack hotel resorts, ferries and a shopping mall all used by Western foreigners in the port city of Mombasa.
Police raided three homes, one of which was Lewthwaite’s and inside one they found crude bomb-making materials similar to that used in the London bombings.
Lewthwaite armed with a laptop and bomb parts including up to 500 fuses and bundles of US cash had escaped the police cordon somehow but officers found a South African passport under the name Natalie Faye Webb, 26, but carrying Lewthwaite’s photograph.
It was one of three identities she had been using to move about, one of which was her own. She escaped with her children and Ghani but another Londoner Jermaine Grant was detained.
From Grant, police gleaned much information about Lewthwaite’s activities and her association including alleged marriage to Ghani. They were to raid another three homes, two of which were also occupied by Lewthwaite for a time.
Police also found in the original raided apartment a diary in which Lewthwaite said she hoped her children would one day become suicide bombers.
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The number of bodies beneath collapsed floors remains unknown -- at the Kenya mall attacked by al Shabaab militants. Gavino Garay reports.
She had been dubbed the White Widow around the time of the death of Lindsay but the name was now taking on a different meaning with intelligence agencies including the CIA listing her on most wanted lists on suspicions of carrying out low-level terror attacks but plotting larger ones against Western targets.
Last March when she was listed by the CIA, Interpol and Scotland Yard’s counter terrorist command as a “British extremist” and fugitive suspected of having trained other female jihadist for explosive attacks and carried out grenade attacks herself, her father Andy, now 57, was still in denial and claimed there was no way his daughter would be involved “in anything to do with terrorism”.
“She was so badly affected by what happened before and would have nothing to do with it I am sure of that,” he said.
Police then gained intelligence that she and others, hiding out in a remote part of Somalia, were plotting to free Grant from jail where he was awaiting trial over the Christmas bomb plot. Authorities were forced to move him several times to different prisons.
For a while she had been using a Twitter account to rail against the West but otherwise was lying low.
On September 13 this year bombmaker Ghani, also known as Osama al-Britani and Sheik Towfiq, was killed in a gunbattle in Somalia alongside one of America’s most wanted terrorists Omar Hammami, also known as al-Amriki (The American).
Suspected British militant Jermaine Grant.
Suspected British militant Jermaine Grant. Source: AFP
They were killed by members of their own al-Shabaab cohorts after a split in the group in June. Lewthwaite, also known as Sherafiyah and also Asmaa Shahidah Bint-Andrews, was nowhere to be seen but there were unconfirmed reports she was living for a time with Ghani even though by this stage he had a wife and children of his own.
She was on the run again with other foreign Muslim convert extremists and her children. The 29-year-old was at this stage believed to be a mother of four.
AS authorities battled it out with the militants in Nairobi’s Westgate mall this week, Grant, 31, was facing court on the earlier bomb plot charges.
In Northern Ireland, Lewthwaite’s 85-year-old grandmother Elizabeth Allen — who had earlier been given a panic alarm by police should Lewthwaite ever show up — collapsed under the strain of the knowledge her granddaughter had been implicated in the latest extremist atrocities. She remains in hospital suffering “severe stress”.
There have been numerous conflicting reports of the “pale skinned” woman involved in the latest atrocity but if the body found in the mall is confirmed as Lewthwaite it would have been the end of a very turbulent life for the once happy carefree teenager.
If nothing else her involvement in the terror attack and that of other foreigners from Britain and the US, will prompt an international response to al-Shabaab which began as a gang to combat Kenya’s military battling Somalia militants but now has turned this dispute into an international war
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