The 7/7 widow and a boom in British jihad

We cannot say we weren’t warned. On September 16 2010, Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, addressed an audience of security professionals in London. A “significant number of UK residents”, he said, were training with the Somali Islamists, al-Shabaab. “It’s only a matter of time before we see terrorism on our streets inspired by those who are today fighting alongside al-Shabaab.”

Before that threat is fully realised, the people of East Africa are having to deal with vacationing British Islamists. MI5 say that around 60 British jihadis are fighting or training in Somalia, their costs defrayed by sympathisers in Britain.

Until they have the resources to target the infidels back home, these extremists are causing mayhem in Somalia and neighbouring Kenya. Jermaine Grant, lately of Newham, east London, has gone on trial in Mombasa, after police found ammunition and bomb-making chemicals – ammonium nitrate, acetone and lead nitrate – in his flat in a seedy suburb of the city. It is highly likely, as Kenyan police suspect, that his targets were Western tourists. Except there aren’t many tourists since al-Shabaab kidnapped and killed the 66-year-old French tetraplegic Marie Dedieu in the exotic resort of Lamu in October last year, then killed a British man and abducted his wife. Five months on, Judith Tebbutt from Aylesbury is still missing.

This week we learnt that Kenyan police hunting al-Shabaab terrorists are desperately seeking Samantha Lewthwaite, a 28-year-old from Buckinghamshire. Ms Lewthwaite, who converted to Islam when she was 15, is the widow of the 7/7 King’s Cross bomber, Jermaine Lindsay. According to Kenyan police sources, Lewthwaite and her friend Habib Ghani, of Hounslow, are connected to Jermaine Grant. Ghani, who calls himself “Osama”, is said to be carrying more than 500 bomb fuses and bundles of US dollars.

Following the London atrocities in July 2005, Lewthwaite claimed to find her late husband’s actions “abhorrent”. It seems strange, then, that she is allegedly using (three) false passports and associating with a terrorist suspect, in a region that is currently regarded as the most dangerous front in the fight against international terrorism. Reports claim she is “no small fish” in terrorist circles, describing her role as a “financier”.

the telegraph