The widow of a 7/7 London bomber is reportedly being hunted by police in Kenya, suspected of involvement in an alleged terror plot to target Mombasa last Christmas.

Today’s allegations have appeared prominently in the British media, including the front page of The Times , despite the apparent lack of evidence supporting the accusations. Kenyan police are searching for a woman who claims to be South African and is using a passport in the name of “Natalie Faye Webb”, believed to be the name of an innocent English woman who was the victim of identity theft.

The fake passport photo has been released to the media, and whilst the person in the photo does resemble older confirmed photographs of Samantha Lewthwaite, Kenyan police have conceded that Lewthwaite herself could have been the victim of identity theft, with the suspect fraudulently using her details, rather than Lewthwaite fraudulently using someone else’s details. The police also described reports of their apparent hunt for Lewthwaite as “very premature information. We are not confirming whether we are doing it or not.”

With doubt over the suspect’s real identity, and a lack of evidence presented about the crimes of which they are suspected, the story’s appearance and subsequent promotion in the British media is interesting — though perhaps unsurprising when we learn that the terror cell Lewthwaite has been accused of being part of is “affiliated to the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab”.

As detailed in a previous article, Britain and the US are currently preparing for military strikes against Al Shabaab, an Islamic insurgent group accused of affiliating with Al Qaeda, who are fighting the Western-backed transitional government in Somalia. Somalia is geostrategically important to the Western elite due to its proximity to important oil shipping routes, as well as the country’s suspected possession of vast amounts of natural resources — including huge untapped oil reserves, as well as large uranium deposits.

A conference about Somalia took place in London last week and was attended by David Cameron and Hillary Clinton, amongst many other prominent Western political leaders. During the conference the supposed terror threat to the UK posed by young jihadists was pointedly hyped, Cameron claiming that British Muslims allegedly traveling to fight with Al Shabaab, could return to commit terror attacks in their homeland. Such alarmist and unsubstantiated claims help justify further taxpayer-funded military intervention in yet another foreign country, in which innocent Somali civilians will die, simply to expand the power and wealth of the Western political and financial elite.

In this context, today’s sensational headlines can be seen as a cynical attempt at connecting, in the mind of the British public, Islamic insurgents in the Horn of Africa with the London terror attacks of 2005. Despite denying knowledge of her husband’s plan to detonate explosives on the London Underground — Lewthwaite said she “totally abhorred” his actions — her protestations of innocence were received cynically by many, who judged her guilty by association for her husband’s attack.

Promoting an as yet unproven accusation that she is working as a terrorist for Al Shabaab, the media is providing cover for the British government’s immoral plans to attack yet another oil-producing Islamic country, in the name of “fighting terrorism” and “humanitarian intervention”.