7/7 bomber’s widow linked to al-Qaeda is sought in Somalia

KENYAN police say that pregnant British woman Samantha Lewthwaite, the widow of 7 July, 2005 bomber Jermaine Lindsay, has fled the country for Somalia, where she is believed to have connections to an al-Qaeda-linked militia.

A senior police official said Lewthwaite, 28, and originally from Aylesbury, is part of a group of British citizens and other foreign nationals who arrived in Kenya last year to plan a bomb attack on the Kenyan coast over Christmas and New Year. Lewthwaite was in charge of finances for the planned attack, he said.

Officials believe Lewthwaite, a mother of three, has fled to Somalia, the police official said. She is connected to the aide of East Africa’s top al-Qaeda operative. Both men were killed in Somalia last year and she is on the run.

The group was allegedly collaborating with Kenyans sympathetic to the al-Qaeda-linked Somali militant group al-Shabaab, the official said.

Al-Shabaab has vowed to launch attacks in Kenya in retaliation for Kenyan troops crossing into Somalia in October. Kenya blames al-Shabaab for cross-border attacks in which at least ten Kenyans and four Europeans were kidnapped.

Earlier this year al-Qaeda announced it had merged with al-Shabaab, Somalia’s most dangerous militant group.

Lewthwaite is the widow of Jermaine Lindsay, one of four men who set off bombs on a bus and Tube trains in London in 2005. Some 52 people died and more than 700 were wounded.

The police official said Anti-Terrorism Police Unit officers suspect Lewthwaite was working with Musa Hussein Abdi, the Kenyan shot dead alongside al-Qaeda boss Fazul Abdullah Mohammed in Somalia last June.

Anti-terrorist police found a British woman – believed to be Lewthwaite – in Abdi’s house on 20 December but let her go after being fooled by the fake South African passport she carried in the name of Rachel Faye Webb. The official said police went to Abdi’s house while retracing the steps of Jermaine Grant, another British national who arrived in Kenya in last year.

Grant was arrested earlier that day after police were given a tip-off that he was involved in the planned attack. When police searched his house, they found bomb-making materials.

Later that day, the officers led Grant to Abdi’s nearby house, where they found his widow and a British woman.

The officers released both women but were ordered to return to the scene by their bosses. By then the foreign woman was gone. The real Webb is a nurse in the UK who has dual British and South African citizenship and is a victim of identity theft, he said.

Police suspect that Lewthwaite rented two houses in upmarket areas in Mombasa in order to assemble a bomb. Police believe al-Shabaab still intends to launch a terrorist attack in Kenya.

The official said Lewthwaite is pregnant and married to a Kenyan who has fled the country.

Mohammed – the al-Qaeda mastermind behind the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania – topped the FBI’s most wanted list for 13 years before his death last year.

He was also linked to the 2002 bombing of a tourist hotel at the Kenyan coast and a near-simultaneous attempt to bring down an Israeli airliner.

Grant has been jailed for three years for immigration offences. His Kenyan wife – whom he married just 24 hours before his arrest – has also been charged.