'White Widow' Samantha Lewthwaite wanted for questioning in relation to deaths of a number of men in Kenya
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Kenyan police have linked Samantha Lewthwaite, the British "white widow" terror suspect on the run from global police, to series of murders in Kenya, including of two Christian clergymen.
The soldier's daughter from Aylesbury, whose husband Gemaine Lindsay was one of the July 7 suicide bombers, is wanted for questioning in relation to the deaths of seven men on Kenya's coast.
They include fundamentalist Muslim preachers, two Christian pastors and three others, according Aggrey Adoli, the head of Kenyan police for its coastal province.
His officers were searching for eight people over the killings, which date back to August last year, and he initially said the suspects were Kenyan, Somali, Tanzanian and Ugandan.
But he added that Lewthwaite, 29, may also be involved and that she should give herself up to answer questions over the deaths.
She may also be recruiting young Muslims to fight for Somalia's al-Shabaab
militia, he said, and could be liable for inciting them to join jihadist
attacks. Lewthwaite fled Kenya two years ago and is believed to have been in
Somalia since then.
Mr Adoli was accused of trying to deflect attention from accusations that his
own officers were responsible for the murders, claims that have repeatedly
been made by Muslim human rights groups in Kenya.
"These are just allegations, they are a smokescreen," said Sheikh
Abubakar Shariff Ahmed, a close associate of Sheikh Aboud Rogo, a
fundamentalist Muslim preacher popular in Mombasa who was one of the men who
was killed.
"It is normality – they will name Samantha with no basis whatsoever. The
biggest suspects in the murder of Sheikh Aboud Rogo are the police, not
al-Shabaab."
Diplomatic and security sources in Nairobi on Saturday also questioned Mr
Adoli's suggestion that Lewthwaite was involved in the murder of Muslims in
Mombasa.
"Like much of the Lewthwaite spin, it makes no sense," said one
security analyst, refusing to be named because doing do would jeopardise
links to key radical figures in Mombasa.
"Why would she want people like Sheikh Rogo dead? If we are to believe
that she is some kind of radical jihadist, surely Rogo and his followers are
on her side."
Mr Adoli could not immediately be reached to clarify his comments, which were
originally reported in Kenyan media, but he had earlier denied that his men
were connected to the murders.
"The government or police cannot be the protector of people and their
property as enshrined in the Constitution, and then turn to be the killer of
the same," he said.
"People should completely erase mentality from linking the government to
such deaths." A Kenyan police spokesman in Nairobi did not answer calls
to her phone on Saturday.
Lewthwaite is already charged with possessing bomb-making chemicals and
plotting explosives in Mombasa, Kenya's main coast city where there are
dozens of beachside resorts popular with British tourists.
She fled the city in almost two years ago after she was briefly questioned at
a friend's house by Kenyan detectives who believed her story that she was a
tourist from South Africa.
British intelligence soon realised that the woman was in fact the July 7
bomber's widow and alerted their Kenyan counterparts that she could be
working with Somali-based al-Qaeda terrorists planning attacks in Kenya