The five-bedroom house in Shanzu, near Ngomeni, where police recovered bomb making materials and bullets. Ms Lewthwaite escaped moments before the raid.
By KIPCHUMBA SOME ksome@ke.nationmedia.com AND ANTHONY KITIMO akitimo@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted Saturday, March 17 2012 at 22:30
Posted Saturday, March 17 2012 at 22:30
IN SUMMARY
- CIA, Scotland Yard and Mossad on the trail of woman even as Kenya police is suspected of complicity in her escape
Neighbours in the high-end estate in Bakarini, Nyali West in Mombasa only knew her as the strange “White English” woman who seldom ventured outside her house and carried a curious bag wherever she went.
What they did not know is that Ms Samantha Lewthwaite, 28, a fresh-faced mother of three from Aylesbury, United Kingdom, is a top al-Qaeda operative whose presence in Kenya has sparked an international manhunt.
Described by Kenyan authorities as a “dangerous woman”, Ms Lewthwaite, the daughter of a retired British military officer and widow of a suicide bomber, is wanted for organising and financing terrorist activities inside the country and beyond.
Britain’s Scotland Yard and the US Central Intelligence Agency and other anti-terror forces around the world, including Israel’s Mossad, are said to be on the trail of the woman said by Western media to be a “big fish” in terrorism circles.
Ms Lewthwaite is the widow of Jamaican-born Jermaine Lindsay, an al-Qaeda terrorist who blew himself up in the King’s Cross underground station on July 7, 2005, killing 26 people and wounding hundreds more.
She told the British media that she abhorred what her husband did but, after mysteriously disappearing from her hometown six years ago, she resurfaced last year in Kenya, apparently having decided to follow her husband’s footsteps into the fateful world of international terrorism.
In Kenya, the search for Ms Lewthwaite, who also goes by her Islamic name Asmantara, and her accomplices, has been stepped up following the grenade attacks last Saturday night at the Machakos Country Bus Station in Nairobi that have claimed nine lives so far.
Police say the attacks were the handiwork of Al-Shabaab, the Somali-based insurgent group that the Kenyan army is currently fighting. The group has in the past claimed responsibility for similar attacks in Kenya since Operation Linda Nchi began last October but has denied responsibility for the March 10 attack.
Following major setbacks at the hands of combined Kenyan, Somali, Ethiopian and African Union troops, Al-Shabaab announced last month that it was merging with Al-Qaeda, a move analysts say was a desperate attempt to keep itself alive and relevant.
The role played by Ms Lewthwaite in the Kenyan attacks is unclear, but investigations by the Sunday Nation paint the portrait of a sophisticated terrorist whose extraordinary escape from a police dragnet a month ago also raises questions about possible complicity on the part of the anti-terror police.
According to a passport recovered after a January 27 police raid on a house where she lived in Nyali, Ms Lewthwaite arrived in the country with her three children on November 21, 2011, on a visitor’s visa that was to expire on February 4.
She did not travel on her own passport but that of Natalie Faye Webb, a South African. British authorities say the real Ms Webb is a 26-year-old South African-born nurse based in Essex, England, who is a victim of identity theft.
From passport
Also recovered from the Nyali house was a passport of Aaron Webb, believed to be that of Ms Lewthwaite’s last-born son. Information from the passport indicates the boy was born on November 14, 2008, in South Africa; the document appears to have been issued in the same country.
But, according to The Daily Telegraph of the UK, the boy was born at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, Bucks, in August 2009. A family insider said they were told the father was a Muslim Moroccan from Birmingham.
The passport was issued on February 1, 2011, and is due to expire on January 31, 2016. Passports for the woman’s other two sons were not recovered.
Few people visited the house, recalled a watchman at the Nyali house. One of those who used to visit was a man of Arab origin who only visited at night. The identity of the man is yet to be established. However, some suspect it could have been Grant.
Unconfirmed reports indicate Ms Lewthwaite might have been sneaked out of the country through the Lunga-Lunga border to Tanzania after allegedly bribing some influential senior security officials to provide her cover.
On arrival, it seems Ms Lewthwaite headed to the Coast, which has become the destination of choice for international terrorists. Our investigations reveal that she operated three safe houses in high-end estates at the Coast.
In Kisauni, she lived in a house belonging to a wife of Musa Hussein Abdi, alias Dheere, a British-born terrorist who lived in Africa for a long time and who was killed in Somalia last year alongside Fazul Mohammed.
The latter was the mastermind of the August 7, 1998, bombings on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the November 2002 attacks on the Israeli-owned Paradise Hotel in Kikambala, Kilifi.
Paid up front
In Shanzu, near Ngomeni village, Ms Lewthwaite lived in a five-bedroom villa whose monthly rent is reported to be Sh150,000. “She paid four months rent up front,” said the caretaker of the villa who did not wish to be named.
The Daily Mail of UK reports that the house was rented out on November 17, using the Mozambique passport of Narco Costa, 29.
On December 19, anti-terrorism police raided the house following a tip that an Al-Qaeda linked terror cell was planning to blow up hotels and shopping centres at the Coast over the Christmas and New Year holidays.
According to an anti-terrorism police officer who participated in the raid, Ms Lewthwaite escaped moments before the operation. “We had good intelligence that she was there, but I am yet to understand how she got out,” he said.They recovered 60 bullets, two magazines for AK-47 rifles and bomb- making material including acetone, hydrogen peroxide, ammonium nitrate, sulphur, lead nitrate chemicals, size “AA” batteries, an electric switch and a piece of conductive wire.
However, The Sun of the UK claims that Ms Lewthwaite was briefly arrested during the raid but convinced the anti-terrorism officers to let her go after showing them her forged South African passport.
She is said to have fled with a laptop, cash and bomb-making material. She then moved to a high-walled three-bedroom Swahili house in Bakarani, Nyali West, where she paid a monthly rent of Sh40,000.
The house is located a few kilometres from the house where Jermaine Grant, alias Ali Mohammed, a 29-year-old Briton facing terrorism charges, was arrested together with his wife Warda Breik in mid-December.
A convicted paedophile, Grant was recently jailed for a year for being in the country illegally. He is also alleged to have been part of a group that raided Kulmia Hamud police post in Wajir in 2008 during which guns were stolen.
Planned attacks
It was from these houses, anti-terrorism police officers say, that Ms Lewthwaite dished out money to field terrorists and perhaps planned attacks on local and Western interests, right under the noses of unsuspecting neighbours and police.
It is believed that she escaped with about 500 bomb fuses and an unknown amount of cash after the Nyali raid. The source of the money also remains a mystery, although it is believed to be from well-moneyed individuals.
Secrecy is the catchword in the world of terrorism, and it seems Ms Lewthwaite remained true to it. Always clad in an abaya, a Muslim black gown, and a niqab, the cloth that covers the face except the eyes, she remained a mystery to everyone.
Nyali is home to some of Kenya’s richest people. It is common for expatriates and tourists to rent houses there, and the neighbours thought Ms Lewthwaite was perhaps one of them. But there was something amiss about her, recalls the caretaker in the Nyali house.
“We wondered why, if she was an expatriate or tourist, she would not hire a house help despite having small children. Furthermore, the children never went to school but she taught them in the house,” he added.
And then there was the mystery of the bag that never left her hands. “She carried it everywhere, even when she was relaxing in the compound,” said the watchman. No one knows what the bag contained.
According to one of the guards at the Nyali house, Ms Lewthwaite used motorbikes, popularly known as boda boda, and sometimes taxis, as her means of transport around town. “But she never used the same vehicle twice,” he said.
In addition to two security guards, her house was constantly under lock, secured using an alarm padlock even when she was inside. “The police had a rough time accessing the house because of the lock,” said the caretaker.
In the history of terrorism, women have usually played peripheral roles. They have either provided companionship to field terrorists and their masters or acted as suicide bombers. Al-Qaeda used the first female suicide bomber in Iraq in 2005.
But the entry of Ms Lewthwaite as a key financier and fundraiser could herald a radical shift in tactics of terror networks where women, given their ability to convince and camouflage, could play more prominent roles.
It is still unclear what position Ms Lewthwaite occupies in the Al-Qaeda hierarchy, but it seems it is significant. It has been reported that when Grant was under questioning, he told Kenyan investigators that “you should be arresting the boss!”
It is believed that Grant provided the crucial lead for the January 27 raid on Ms Lewthwaite’s Nyali house by a team of General Service Unit’s Recce squad, Anti Terrorism Police Unit and National Security Intelligence Service.
But Ms Lewthwaite had apparently left two days before the raid. When the Sunday Nation visited the house, only a washing machine was found in the kitchen after the police took away all her belongings for forensic analysis.
Sources within the anti-terrorism police said some of the exhibits recovered in the Shanzu house include four bags emblazoned with the logo of a local bank used to carry money and more than 500 sticks used to ignite explosives.
But the manner in which she dodged the police dragnet raises more questions than answers. According to the watchman at the Nyali house, Ms Lewthwaite left with her children on the evening of January 25, using a red Peugeot.
Investigators later found a similar car parked at the house where she used to live in Shanzu although they are yet to confirm whether it is the one she used to escape.
“It is clear that she was tipped off by somebody who knew of our operation,” said an officer with the anti-terrorism police unit who requested not to be named.
“We had her within our sights. It is an operation that took a lot of planning, and chances for failure were minimal. One of us must have sabotaged our plans. It is quite discouraging for those of us who dedicate time and resources to this kind of work.”
The source also revealed that a laptop that was among the equipment confiscated that night was left in the suspect’s house only to be found the following day with its screen smashed and some memory chips missing.
Senior officers
The order to leave behind some of the exhibits among them a laptop came from some senior officers who were heading the operation, said the officer. “From that you can guess who sabotaged the whole operation.”
Vigilance House is silent on allegations that some of their officers aided Ms Lewthwaite’s escape. But the Sunday Nation has learnt that a senior officer with the anti-terrorism unit has since been transferred to Nairobi following the botched operation.
Following the raid, the police obtained a warrant of arrest for Ms Lewthwaite to face charges of being in possession of explosives and conspiracy to improvise an explosive device with intent to cause harm to innocent citizens.
British authorities contend that there could be up to 50 of their citizens currently receiving training in terror cells in Kenya and Somalia. Kenyan police say they have foiled more than 100 terror attempts in the past year.
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