{"id":10590,"date":"2013-09-24T12:13:14","date_gmt":"2013-09-24T12:13:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/praag.org\/?p=10590"},"modified":"2013-09-24T12:13:14","modified_gmt":"2013-09-24T12:13:14","slug":"daughter-of-british-soldier-said-to-be-involved-in-kenyan-terror-attack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praag.org\/?p=10590","title":{"rendered":"Daughter of British soldier said to be involved in Kenyan terror attack"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"lewthwaite\"<\/a>Kenyan officials have given contradictory statements about whether a British woman may have been involved in the attack on the Westgate mall which has left at least 62 people dead.<\/p>\n

Samantha Lewthwaite, a 29-year-old Muslim convert, nicknamed the “White Widow” is in the spotlight after a Kenyan minister said a British woman was among the Islamist attackers who shot dead dozens of people at a Nairobi shopping mall.<\/p>\n

Her alleged involvement and South African passport was reported on a pro-Israeli website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The Briton was married to Germaine Lindsay, one of four suicide bombers who attacked the London transport network in July 2005, killing 52 people.<\/p>\n

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The mother-of-three has been on the run in East Africa for around two years and is wanted by Kenyan police for alleged involvement in a terror plot.<\/p>\n

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Foreign Minister Amina Mohamed told US public broadcaster PBS that a British woman was among those to blame, along with two or three American men.<\/p>\n

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“And she has, I think, done this many times before,” Mohamed said, without identifying her.<\/p>\n

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But Kenyan Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku earlier denied that any of the insurgents were women, saying some male attackers “had dressed like women.”<\/p>\n

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The British government refused to be drawn on suggestions one of its citizens was among the attackers.<\/p>\n

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The daughter of a British soldier, Lewthwaite professed herself appalled when her Jamaican-born husband detonated a rucksack full of explosives and blew himself up on a London Underground train on July 7, 2005, killing 26 people.<\/p>\n

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She was pregnant with their second child at the time.<\/p>\n

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“I totally condemn and am horrified by the atrocities which occurred in London,” she said, describing Lindsay as “a good and loving husband and a brilliant father, who showed absolutely no sign of doing this atrocious crime”.<\/p>\n

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Lewthwaite had met Lindsay in an Internet chat forum when she was 17, having converted to Islam two years earlier.<\/p>\n

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Described as a bubbly teenager, schoolfriends said she had an ordinary upbringing in the market town of Aylesbury, northwest of London.<\/p>\n

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Kenyan police released wanted notices saying she was travelling on a false South African passport under the name Natalie Faye Webb, accompanied by her three children, a girl and two boys.<\/p>\n

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The children would be now roughly aged between seven and 12.<\/p>\n

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South African authorities said they were carrying out a “thorough investigation” into the passport issue.<\/p>\n

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Raffaello Pantucci, a terror expert at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, said Lewthwaite had acquired a “semi-mythical status”.<\/p>\n

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“I don’t think we’ve had any concrete evidence of her being involved in this incident,” he said.<\/p>\n

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“But the fact of her being mentioned in this context is not surprising because of her connections.”<\/p>\n

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Rumours abound that Lewthwaite is behind the Twitter handle\u00a0@MYC_Press\u00a0— Kenya’s radical Muslim Youth Centre — which regularly comments on Kenyan extremism, as well as entering into a war of words with rival Islamists.<\/p>\n

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American Islamist Omar Hammami — who fought in Somalia but was killed by former Shehab comrades this month — in April scoffed via Twitter that she was just “a girl in Kenya”.<\/p>\n

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MYC_Press in turn replied: “Sam Lewthwaite thinks ur (you are) a irritating obnoxious contemptible little Muj (mujahedeen) PRAT.”<\/p>\n

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MYC_Press — which has been notably silent since the attack began on Saturday — also told AFP in April that Lewthwaite had “returned to Luton”, a town outside London and close to where she grew up. – Sapa\/AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kenyan officials have given contradictory statements about whether a British woman may have been involved in the attack on the Westgate mall which has left at least 62 people dead. Samantha Lewthwaite, a 29-year-old Muslim convert, nicknamed the “White Widow” is in the spotlight after a Kenyan minister said a British woman was among the … Continue reading “Daughter of British soldier said to be involved in Kenyan terror attack”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10591,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,3,10,123],"tags":[6451,6453,6452],"class_list":["post-10590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe","category-news","category-united-states","category-world","tag-attack-on-the-westgate-mall","tag-muslim-convert","tag-samantha-lewthwaite"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/praag.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/lewthwaite.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10592,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10590\/revisions\/10592"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}