By Philip Bradfield
Samantha Lewthwaite was born in Banbridge in 1983, to English soldier Andrew Lewthwaite and local girl Elizabeth Allen. The family later moved to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, though she still has relatives in Co Down. Friends say she was hurt badly by her parents’ divorce and sought solace at the home of a Muslim friend. She converted to Islam at 17 and married another English convert, 19-year-old carpet fitter Germaine Lindsay, that year. They fell under the influence of Jamaican Muslim convert Trevor Forrest, who is serving 18 years in the US for terrorism. She dropped out of a politics and religion degree at the University of London to become a wife and mother. He blew himself up on the Piccadilly line on 7 July 2005, claiming 26 lives in the deadliest of the 7/7 bomb attacks that changed Britain forever. Since then Lewthwaite has been linked to over 240 murders in multiple terrorist attacks across Africa. In 2012 Kenya issued an arrest warrant for her on charges of possessing bomb-making material and conspiring to make an explosive device; She remains on an Interpol red notice / international arrest warrant list. David Videcette, a former Metropolitan Police anti-terrorism officer who spent years on her case says nobody understands why she converted. “Maybe it was in search of an identity she didn鈥檛 think she had,” he told the Daily Telegraph. By July 2005, the month of 7/7, police believe she supported her husband’s suicide bombing because she failed to report him missing. When she gave birth to her daughter soon after, she gave her the middle name Shahidah, which means 鈥渕artyr鈥 (her eldest child also has the male form, Shaheed, as a middle name). In July 2008, she caught a flight to Johannesburg and married Fahmi Salim, a Kenyan with family links to al-Qaeda. She wrote in her journal: 鈥淚 asked [Allah] for a man who would go forth, give all he could for Allah鈥檚 cause and spend a life terrorising the disbelievers as they have us.鈥 The following year, she moved with him to Kenya, where they joined an al-Shabaab terrorist cell. Police got wind of it and arrested a British member, Jermaine Grant, who named Lewthwaite as the senior member. But Matt Bryden, a Horn of Africa expert who led counterterrorism co-ordination for the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, rejects the myths around her. “She was an operator but not a leader and certainly not the kind of lethal international assassin that she was portrayed as being,” he said. In 2011 she fled to Somalia, believing she was safe there from the authorities. Abdisalam Guled, a former deputy director of Somalia鈥檚 National Intelligence Security Agency, says she became part of al-Shabaab鈥檚 executive team and Shura council – highly unusual for a woman. 鈥淩umours circulated that she was married to several al-Shabaab leaders,” he said. Little has been heard of her for six years. Her family refused to talk to the Telegraph. Her father did not return calls to the News Letter. David Videcette says she may have been killed in a strike against al-Shabaab. 鈥淚t worries me that we still don鈥檛 understand much about Samantha,” he added.