White British girl joins Al Shabab and flees to Somalia
Posted: Thu Mar 08, 2012 1:31 pm
By Amy Willis, Los Angeles
8:40AM GMT 06 Mar 2012
Samples from Lewthwaite, the widow of suicide bomber Jermaine Lindsay, are an exact match to prints from a suspect seen fleeing across the Tanzanian border in August, Kenyan police said.
Scotland Yard detectives confirmed the match after the Kenyan authorities sent samples from their suspect, dubbed the “white widow” by local police, Kenyan police said.
“Samantha Lewthwaite’s fingerprints have been confirmed by detectives we have been working with from the UK. This woman is still in the country. She will not escape if she passes through exit points at the border because of her fingerprints,” a Kenyan police chief told The Daily Mail on condition of anonymity.
“We are confident we are looking for the white widow,” the officer added.
Yesterday police released an image of the woman, cloaked in a striped headscarf, crossing the border.
The picture was taken by an undercover officer as the mother-of-three fled to Tanzania with her children, using a forged passport.
She is believed to have been travelling with another Briton, Habib Ghani, from Hounslow, Middlesex.
The 28-year-old Briton converted to Islam when she was 15, and has been travelling under the name Natalie Faye Webb, a nurse from Essex who is the victim of identity fraud.
Kenyan police launched a manhunt for the young mother last week after discovering an arsenal of bomb-making equipment and explosives at a house in Mombasa. They believe Lewthwaite had been living at the house.
Lewthwaite, who is originally from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, disappeared in December last year after suspected co-conspirators Jermaine Grant, also British, and Foaud Abubakar were arrested by anti-terror police.
She is accused of running bomb-making tutorials for Al Shabaab as well as being part of an alleged plot to blow up shopping centres and hotels in Kenya over the Christmas and New Year period.
She is believed to have fled up the coast to Somalia.
Her family in Ayslebury have appealed for her to come home but said they haven’t seen her in years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... waite.html
Somalia need all the help it can get.
