A journalist has recalled being among the first to be dispatched to Samantha Lewthwaite’s hometown 20 years ago when her connection to the London terror attacks first emerged.
Mirror reporter Tom Pettifor was sent out after her husband Germaine Lindsay, 19, was identified as the fourth bomber who set off a device on a Piccadilly line train at King’s Cross, killing himself and 26 others on July 7, 2005.
Pettifor says Lewthwaite appeared to have been “shocked” by his actions and the journalist “had no reason to suspect that she would go on to become one of the world’s most wanted women”.
He said: “A picture of her, then 21, smiling as she snuggled up to husband and hugged their one-year-old son appeared to depict a devoted mother. Another snap showed her as a typical schoolgirl aged 16. Neighbours in Aylesbury, Bucks, described her as a shy child who had converted to Islam at 18 and began wearing traditional Muslim clothes.
“The daughter of a former British Army soldier, she was said to have been deeply affected by her parents’ divorce when she was 11. She met Lindsay, from West Yorkshire, in an Islamic chatroom and they married in a ceremony at a house in 2002, using their adopted names Asmantara and Jamal.”
Pettifor says that none of her family attended and she later recalled: “My father didn’t approve and my mum just couldn’t make it. I was his youngest daughter. He found it hard enough when I converted to Islam, without marrying a Muslim I hardly knew.”
She and Lindsay, who changed his name to Abdullah Shaheed Jamal when he converted, had a child. Lewthwaite was seven months’ pregnant with their second when he launched his murderous attack.
Pettifor said: “The widow said she had no idea he had been planning anything. She said the bombings were ‘abhorrent’ and that she condemned them ‘with all my heart’. But the 7/7 inquests heard she had been to West Yorkshire to visit ringleader Mohammad Sidique Khan. She gave birth to a third son in Aylesbury in 2009.”
One family member told Pettifor they could not believe she was a terrorist. He added: “After 7/7 happened, I asked her several times if she knew it was going to happen and she always told me she didn’t know. I cannot believe she would be involved in something like this and be there with the children.”
Lewthwaite is believed to have narrowly escaped capture when she was travelling on a bus from Kenya to Somalia in late 2008 with fellow terror suspect Jermaine Grant. Police swooped on the pair at their Mombasa home in December 2011 – but Lewthwaite escaped and has been on the run ever since.
She was put on Interpol’s list of most wanted criminals in 2013 amid claims she had plotted a string of terror attacks. Security analysts have previously said that she is probably being sheltered at a remote location in Somalia or Tanzania, unable to travel from her hiding place for fear of being killed. The alternative – as some of her family fear – is that she is already dead. The fate of her four children is also shrouded in mystery.
The Met Police confirmed in August that Grant had been detained at Heathrow airport under the Terrorism Act.
In a statement, the force said: “We can confirm that on 8 August, officers from the Met Police arrested [a] 41-year-old man who was wanted on recall to prison in relation to breaching licence conditions linked to a previous conviction.”
Grant was also arrested on suspicion of being a member of al-Shabaab, an Islamist militant group, the Met Police said.