Samantha Lewthwaite: Wanted Dead or Alive

27th September 2013

The massacre at the Westgate shopping centre in Westland, Nairobi targeted victims from all over the world. People with at least 13 nationalities are listed among the dead, representing every continent. The official story is replete with confusion and contradictions about the number of attackers and how many were killed in the counter-assault by Kenyan security forces. Reported among the dead was Samantha Lewthwaite, the widow of one of the alleged 7/7 bombers, but today Interpol issued a Red Notice for her arrest.

This presents us with a conundrum, or should I say yet another conundrum in the Sam Lewthwaite story. Multiple witnesses from the attack by Al Shabaab on the shopping centre spoke of a white woman giving orders to the fighters in Arabic. It was widely speculated that this white woman must be Samantha Lewthwaite, on the grounds that she is the only white woman ever reported to have anything to do with Al Shabaab. However, she is neither in custody nor counted among the Al Shabaab fighters killed by the Kenyan forces so where the hell is she?

It is not the first time we have been made to ask such questions about the enigmatic Lewthwaite. The story told by the mainstream media is that she met Germaine Lindsay a couple of years prior to 7/7 via an internet chatroom about Islam, Lewthwaite having recently converted to Islam. They married and had two children - one born shortly after 7/7. Lewthwaite gave an interview, for which she was very well paid, in September 2005 where she accepted her husband's responsibility for the attacks despite there being no credible evidence against him.

In 2007 she reportedly moved to Kenya with Habib Saleh Ghani, and has since been travelling all over the African continent but primarily in East Africa. A series of police raids in Mombasa in December 2011 supposedly turned up a bomb factory and logicistical HQ where Lewthwaite was running a terror cell. A fake passport bearing a picture of Lewthwaite was found, though the lady herself escaped arrest. Her apparent colleague Jermaine Grant was arrested and has been held since then awaiting trial for having bomb-making materials and conspiring to use them. He was recently acquitted of a charge of violent robbery, only days before Al Shabaab militants first attacked the Westgate shopping centre.

This story, endlessly repeated by the Western press, is inherently implausible. A young white woman with two and now three young mixed-race children would stand out like a Ku Klux Klan member in East Africa, and yet it appears the authorities can't get near her. She keeps slipping through their fingers like Ramzi Yousef or Mohammed Sidique Khan. Furthermore, it makes no sense for her to have embarked on this adventure. She had no previous local contacts, didn't know the local languages, had no experience of the African continent. Why would she go, particularly with young children to consider? It's not exactly a safe environment for children, the world of Islamist terror gangs. Yet somehow she has not struggled, and actually appears to be thriving. She's got fake passports up the yinyang and bags of money to spend, and reports both from Al Shabaab themselves and from the mainstream press seem to think she is highly regarded within the regional Islamist movement.

Most people, if faced with the possibility of their dead husband being a mass murdering suicide bomber, who had just given birth to the dead husband's second child, would find that an immensely difficult situation. Not so Samantha Lewthwaite. She got herself paid behind all the misery and aside from a few bitchy headlines and brainless character assassinations, her piece in the drama was forgotten. But it played a crucial role in selling the notion of suicide bombers to the British public. Lewthwaite is the only bereaved relative of the accused who has unequivocally accepted that their loved one was responsible. All the other relatives have cast doubt on it and expressed their disbelief.

When you add in the fact that her father served in the British army in counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland in the 1970s during Britain's previous war on terror a quite different picture of Sam Lewthwaite emerges. This young woman who manages to thrive in seriously unusual and adverse circumstances is either some kind of super-wench or she's working for British intelligence. How else could she get her hands on fake passports and bags of money in an unfamiliar country where she's in an extreme minority? How else could she successfully evade detection while masterminding a series of increasingly violent terrorist attacks? How else could she successfully infiltrate and become a leader in a movement which views most white people with hatred and views women with utter contempt? Either this story is simply untrue, or she's a spook.

For more on Sam Lewthwaite check out episode 003 of my new ClandesTime podcast.

Related Pages

Samantha Lewthwaite - A conversation with Keelan Balderson

Secrets, Spies and 7/7

7/7 A Conspiracy Theory