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The Home Counties girl training female suicide bombers for Al Qaeda - while trading bitchy insults with a terrorist rival on Twitter
- Samantha Lewthwaite has become 'trainer' of an Al Qaeda bomber squad
- Known as The White Widow, she operates a terror cell in East Africa
- She was married to one of the 7/7 bombers who attacked London in 2005
- Lewthwaite comes from a military family in Buckinghamshire
PUBLISHED:19:59 EST, 26 April 2013| UPDATED:19:59 EST, 26 April 2013
Unlikely terrorist: Samantha Lewthwaite aged 16-17 in her class photograph at school in Buckinghamshire
Along with millions of other young women, Samantha Lewthwaite loves social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook.
But rather than innocent chat about music, fashion or parties, this 29-year-old's main topic of conversation is the poisonous internal politics of the world's most feared terror network.
For Lewthwaite, from a military family in Buckinghamshire, is waging an astonishing battle for control over Al-Qaeda's sophisticated East African terror cells.
The former wife of one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London Underground in July 2005, known to her devoted acolytes as dada mzungu — Swahili for white sister — has become the 'trainer' of an all-female suicide bomber squad targeting Westerners in East Africa as part of the terror group's global jihad.
Her appointment was announced on a website sympathetic to the cause, which revealed that 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]'.
Such is her growing reputation within Al-Qaeda that Lewthwaite, who once went to school discos in Aylesbury in the latest fashions, has felt sufficiently emboldened to launch a vitriolic public attack on a powerful fellow white terror convert.
Using the medium favoured by many of her former classmates, she has taken to Twitter to denounce a rival terrorist and killer as an 'obnoxious little prat'.
These revelations about her recent exploits come in a week when the world has been gripped by a saga with extraordinary parallels.
In the wake of the Boston bombings, it has emerged that the elder of the two brothers thought to have carried out the attacks, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, married an 'all-American' girl who, like Lewthwaite before her, converted to Islam and took to wearing a hijab.
Katherine Russell, described as an A-grade student and devout Christian who wanted to be an aid worker with the U.S. Peace Corps, met Tsarnaev at college in Boston.
The daughter of a doctor, Russell graduated top of the class in 2007 from an exclusive school in Rhode Island, but withdrew from her friends and family after meeting Tsarnaev, who had moved to the U.S. from Chechnya ten years earlier. Three years ago, they had a daughter.
Convert: Lewthwaite, from a military family in Buckinghamshire, has become the ¿trainer¿ of an all-female suicide bomber squad in East Africa
A statement on her behalf was released this week: 'The injuries and loss of life — to people who came to celebrate a race and a holiday — has caused profound distress and sorrow to Katie and her family.
The reports of involvement by her husband and brother-in-law came as an absolute shock.'
Though there is no suggestion that Russell knew of her husband's murderous intent, or has in any way been likened to Samantha Lewthwaite, it is chilling to note that the latter denied any knowledge of what had been planned under her own roof after the identity emerged of Jermaine Lindsay — one of four suicide bombers who killed 52 people in London on July 7, 2005.
Tearfully, the then 21-year-old, whose father had served with the British Army in Northern Ireland, announced she was horrified by his murderous act.
'The day will come when I'll have to tell our children what he did,' she said after the outrage, blaming trips to radical mosques in the UK for poisoning her husband's mind.
How hollow those denials sound as she boasts about her terror activities.
She 'met' Lindsay online and married him three years before he blew himself to pieces. Nearly eight years on, between posting pictures of herself on Facebook and arguing on Twitter, she is believed to be one of Al-Qaeda's main recruiters in East Africa.
Her latest foray into social networking, via bitchy tweets, was directed at a man called Omar Shafik Hammami, a former student from Alabama, who was last year placed on the FBI's most wanted list for plotting terrorist atrocities.
With a $5 million bounty offered by America for information leading to his arrest, Hammami also works as a propagandist for Al-Shabaab, the Somali wing of Al-Qaeda, of which Lewthwaite is a commander, helping recruit English-speaking youths.
Known as The American, Hammami came to prominence after releasing a glamorous video of himself on the internet last year — a move that prompted fury among jealous rival terror factions.
Last week, he made a statement claiming that people within the movement were trying to kill him.
Hideout: Lewthwaite was at one point believed to be renting a flat in Serena Beach Resort in Mombasa, Kenya
Certainly, Lewthwaite is among those whose nose has been put out of joint by this charismatic figure.
After she intervened in a Twitter discussion among terrorists, Hammami dismissed her contribution as worthless because she was 'merely a girl from Kenya'.
A furious Lewthwaite — on the run from the Kenyan police as well as British intelligence after being linked to plots to blow up Western tourist hotels — then hit back in an exchange reproduced on an Islamic website.
'Yes, am a girl in Kenya like dat makes a difference u misogynist!' she tweeted, before adding in the text-speak of a teenager: 'Fyi sam lewthwaite thinks u r a irritating obnoxious contemptible little Muj PRAT.'
She previously posted a poem on Twitter called Maybe Paradise Tomorrow, in which she writes:
'Maybe tomorrow it will be Jannah (Islamic paradise), I look around at how beautiful Jihad is, It's alive in Kenya, It's alive in me, And I'm breathing Jihad, It's my time.'
After initially being sceptical that this lumpy English woman could have become a feared female terrorist, Kenyan, British and American investigators have no doubt about her extraordinary transformation. So, how did it happen?
Bomb plots: Chemicals for explosives were found in the house Lewthwaite was staying in, in the Bakarani area of Mombasa
The youngest of three children, Samantha was born in Co. Down in 1983 after her father, Andrew, met and married Christine, a Northern Ireland girl, during a tour of duty there. The family moved to Aylesbury, but her parents separated when Samantha was 11, leaving her devastated.
Friends have suggested that the separation is the key event that drove her to seek solace in Islam.
Aged 17, Samantha converted and started covering herself head-to-toe in traditional Muslim garb.
She enrolled for a degree in religion and politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. It was at that time she met Jamaican-born Jermaine Lindsay, a fellow Muslim convert, through an Islamic internet chat room.
They married in Aylesbury in 2002 and had two children, one of whom was born after Lindsay and three others donned rucksacks and detonated explosives on three Tube trains and a bus in central London.
After her husband was killed in 2005 and she claimed no knowledge of his activities, she was moved by police to a safe house at an undisclosed location in Britain for questioning.
In 2007, she disappeared from public view and severed all contact with her family two years later.
Her children are believed to have travelled with her to Africa, where she re-surfaced in Kenya last year during a grenade attack on a pub that was packed with people watching England play Italy in Euro 2012.
Witnesses told how they saw a white woman, identified as Lewthwaite, fire grenades into a crowded bar near Nairobi — killing three people, including a nine-year-old boy, and horrifically injuring 30. During a series of earlier raids on safe houses Lewthwaite had been using, police found ammunition, bomb-making equipment and detailed plans for terror attacks on other targets.
Paper trail: A visa issued to Samantha Lewthwaite's son, going by the name of Aaron Webb
Lewthwaite, dubbed 'the white widow' by detectives, had fled — but left behind a laptop with pictures of herself and terror plans.
Yet rather than slip quietly into obscurity after such a close shave, I can reveal that this young woman is still playing with fire. Not only has she been clashing with one of the most popular figures within the terror movement, she is also still active and plotting attacks in Kenya.
To the astonishment of investigators who believed she had fled into lawless Somalia, the Englishwoman has been identified as the brains behind an attempt to free another British terrorist being held in Kenya.
Jermaine Grant, originally from Newham, East London, was a close associate of Lewthwaite in Kenya and a specialist in bomb-making when he was arrested during a raid on one of the safe houses he used with her.
She reportedly returned to Mombasa, the Kenyan coastal resort popular with British tourists, to carry out the escape attempt last month with allies armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
In briefings with police, prosecutors and senior investigators, I have been told Lewthwaite's belongings were found at a house in Mombasa three weeks ago — almost a year after she was thought to have fled the country when she narrowly escaped arrest.
Terror charges: Jermaine Grant, originally from Newham, East London, was a close associate of Lewthwaite in Kenya
Police believe the escape plot was planned to take place as Grant was driven from prison to court.
To thwart any repeat, the trial is due to take place inside the prison where he is held. One senior investigator told me: 'The woman is very intelligent and that is why she managed to disappear when they came across her for the first time.
'She wants to rescue Grant because he's an important asset in their terror activities.
'Grant is an expert in bomb- making, information technology and forgery of documents, and that is why they want him out.'
Not surprisingly, Lewthwaite's family were this week unwilling to discuss the disturbing 'journey' that Samantha has taken since her childhood.
'We have taken a decision to make no comment,' said her father Andrew Lewthwaite.
As well as teams of Kenyan officers, the hunt is being assisted by the SAS, the FBI and CIA, who have set up a unit called the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa, which is dedicated to stopping terrorists.
There has also been something of a breakthrough with the arrest of four fellow female terrorists, who are believed to have information about Lewthwaite's whereabouts.
Converts: Lewthwaite and her late husband Jermaine Lindsay, the suicide bomber who blew up a train at King's Cross in 2005
Currently being held and interrogated inside a Kenyan high-security prison, the four female jihadists are part of the Muslim Youth Centre, a controversial Islamic group in Kenya and a front for the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab.So why hasn't Lewthwaite been caught so far?
Security guards at borders in East Africa are unlikely to search women wearing Islamic robes for cultural reasons — she is indistinguishable from thousands of other women in similar clothing all along this coastline.
At the same time, porous borders and corrupt immigration officers on salaries of just £300 a month mean that — with judicious bribes — extremists such as Lewthwaite can easily flit between African countries. As one Kenyan detective involved in the hunt told me, she is street smart and cunning.
Indeed, she spent much of last year travelling on a stolen passport with the name Natalie Webb.
The passport, which was originally owned by a nurse from Essex, had been skilfully doctored with Lewthwaite's photograph.
Astonishingly, when police raided Lewthwaite's home in Mombasa and had her in their grasp, she used this document to convince them that she was not the white woman they were looking for.
She's had other lucky escapes — the first time being when she was travelling on a bus from Kenya to Somalia with other Islamic extremists, including Jermaine Grant, late in 2008. Grant had disguised himself as a woman by wearing a burqa.
The bus was stopped by police officers, but Lewthwaite was not yet known to them.
While Grant and others were seized, she hid behind an Islamic veil, then continued on her way to the Somali border. Grant and his associates were taken to a police compound in Dadajabula.
Carnage: The train between King's Cross and Russell Square, after the bomb blast during the July 7 attacks
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 properties and plotting more attacks. But Grant was arrested again last year after a tip-off.
Under interrogation, he provided details of the safe houses he had been using with Lewthwaite, including the one in Mombasa. When the police came calling, she escaped capture by persuading them she was Webb.
Six months later, terror leaders revealed in a statement that she had been appointed head of training and recruitment for female suicide bombers in Somalia.
Meanwhile, thanks to her forays into social networking, Samantha Lewthwaite is gaining a cult following among other radicalised young women.
'The kuffar hunt her, but still can't find her, for Allah protect his warriors,' one woman posted on an extremist Islamic website.
'More than four times our white sister has defeated the kuffar. Now every Muslim sister wants to be like our dada mzungu! I will join you white sister. May Allah keep you firm.'
How long Lewthwaite can stay free remains to be seen. But the story of the Buckinghamshire schoolgirl who became a terrorist grows more unsettling with every passing month.
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