How ‘white widow’ Samantha Lewthwaite has escaped anti-terror police traps all along

Samantha Lewthwaite.

By NYAMBEGA GISESA

KENYA: Fanatical Samantha Lewthwaite, dubbed the ‘White Widow’, who is believed to be one of the attackers in the Westgate Mall siege, was last believed to be staying at a house owned by an Al-Shabaab top commander in Garissa County.

Unconfirmed sources claimed the 29-year-old Lewthwaite, who married a Giriama man in Mombasa, is among the masked terrorists in the Nairobi terror attack.

This is after photos of a balaclava-clad white woman holding a gun were posted online.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Joseph ole Lenku, however, Monday stated that all the Nairobi mall assailants are male. Lenku claimed some, however, wore female clothing as a disguise.

Tip off

However, when security forces were tipped off about her presence, they arrived at the house located in the Bula Mzuri area of Garissa town to find that the woman, who also goes by several other aliases, including Natasha Faye Webb, was gone.

“They did not find the white woman,” a provincial administration official from northern Kenya region, whom we requested to tip off anti-terror officers, told us. “Neither did they find her children or signs that children lived in that house.”

The officer said he was surprised about what he was told after the raid. Days earlier, we had travelled to the location and confirmed from an old woman who had access to the house that children were living in the house.

Residents had claimed the white woman and her three children lived in one of the houses. Samantha has become like a ghost that eludes capture again and again.

In early last year, a manhunt by the Kenya Anti-Terrorism Police Unit, America’s Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI, Scotland Yard and London’s Metropolitan Police, that lasted more than six-months, failed to apprehend her.

The charges

At the Mombasa law court where Samantha was being charged in absentia, the case has been closed but with the magistrate ruling that it would continue once she is arrested.

According to court files, Samantha was being charged alongside Habib Saleh Gani (her current husband, a Kenyan) for “being in possession of explosive materials, contrary to Section 29 of the Explosives Act, and conspiracy to commit a felony.”

Samantha is accused of being a financier and planner for a terror cell in Mombasa whose members include the slain cleric Sheikh Rogo, Gani, Jermaine Grant, Faud Abubaker Manswab and Wardo Brek Islam.

She was also connected to Musa Hussein Abdi, an aide of Harun Fazul, who was killed in Somalia in June, 2011. Anti-terrorism police reportedly found Samantha in Abdi’s house during a raid in December 2011 but released her after she fooled them using a fake South African passport she was carrying that bore the name Rachel Faye Webb.

Police have received hundreds of calls from people offering clues and have interviewed dozens who might have met her, in connection with the Westgate Mall attack.

However, very few individuals have ever testified to meeting Samantha face-to-face.

Samantha first came to Kenya travelling using a false name in August, 2011. However, a forged South African passport found in one of her houses raided by police indicated she arrived in Kenya on November 21, 2011.

On January 4, last year, the police obtained a warrant for her arrest from Mombasa Chief Magistrate Lillian Mutende direct ATPU to “arrest Ms Natalia Faye Webb (Ms Lewthwaite) of Britain origin and Kenyan Habib Saleh Gani with immediate effect”.

“Kenya cannot take any chance as far as acts of terrorism are concerned,” she said.

The diary

Gani, whose nickname is Osama, is classified as “very dangerous” and is believed to have commandeered the kidnapping of French woman Marie Dedieu from her beachfront home on Manda Island, Lamu.

Police, who raided some of the houses that Samantha stayed in Mombasa, said they found a diary detailing how to be a suicide bomber’s wife, diet tips, and forged passports. They also found large calibre ammunition, $40,000 (Sh3.4 million) in cash along with telephones, laptops and medicine in a five-bedroomed house in Shanzu.

In the raid of the house in Shanzu, Samantha was said to have been tipped off by a party from the security agencies. Findings from internal police investigations on who tipped her off have never been made public.

Samantha’s first husband was Jermaine Lindsay, who on July 7, 2005 was among other suicide bombers who attacked London’s transport system, killing 52 people.

The raid towards the end of last year followed the last clue to the whereabouts of the elusive Lewthwaite. Since then, investigators have found no trace of her despite hunting for her in several Kenyan towns and in neighbouring Uganda, Tanzania, and Somalia.