Monday, 7 July 2025

Israeli infiltration of the British State?

10.7.2025: In slow motion we are witnessing the British State being transformed into a police state. I have been warning about this for over a decade but of course I carry no weight and have no political or social influence. A protest organisation, protesting against unprecidented brutalitity against the civilian population of Gaza and elsewhere, has been declared to be 'terrorist' and banned, despite its most serious act being to pour paint on some aircraft. It makes a mockery of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Terrorism Act gives draconian powers to the state. Just supporting the organisation verbally can lead to up to fourteen years in gaol if found guilty. Whether any British jury would convict on such an inflated charge is another matter, but that does not remove all the horrors of arrest, interrogation and being held on remand pending trial. The object of the measure is clearly to shut down criticism of Israel's genocide and of Britain's part in it. That any Parliament of whatever persuasion would pass pass such a pathetic, anti-democratic measure, contrary to Britain's constitution and long history of resisting fascism at home and abroad, beggars belief. It is yet more confirmation that the British Government must be in the grip of foreign powers; that it actually cares nothing for the murder and suffering inflicted on the Gazans by a brutal Israeli regime; and gives not a fig for the right of free Englishmen to protest tyranny and evil when they witness it. As Hitler pointed out, if you want to subvert a liberal democracy, you do it in small stages. Clearly Britain has become a Jenga game. How many more blocks will be removed before the tower falls and we all find ourselves crushed by a perverse totalitarian regime? Really, is that what all the politicians who voted for this dastardly measure want? https://veaterecosan.blogspot.com/

The world's population is outraged by this obscenity yet David Lammy before the foreign affairs committee spouts vacuous and lame excuses for inaction. (I suppose that's how he got his name?) Not even a word of condemnation. The contrast with Putin and Russia reveals a deep and malign involvement with crimes of the darkest hue. Shooting starving civilians queuing for food from a helicopter is straight out of the NAZI playbook. Could anything be more cowardly evil?


14.7.2025: Disgusting, disgraceful Israel. (See below) When will these brutal killers and torturers be held to account? On the news this morning another mass killing including children and the BBC dutifully reports Israel's lies that "It was a mistake". Wrong - it's ZIONIST ISRAEL that is the mistake. Let us all hope it all disintegrates and drowns in its own calumny. Which is worse, Israel doing it or Britain supporting it, whilst pretending not to be? The WORLD ought to be OUTRAGED and intervening to assist and protect those poor Gazans but does NOTHING. What is wrong with this DEVIL-controlled world? That I suppose.

Gheed Kassem, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya’s lawyer, posted seven hours ago a horrific update on her Facebook accounts regarding the abducted doctor. Here is a translation:
Dr. Hussam Abu Safia is not well.
I visited him last on July 9, 2025. What I saw was heartbreaking.
Since his detention began, he has lost more than 40 kilograms—over a third of his body weight. He entered prison weighing 100 kilograms. Today, he weighs no more than 60.
On June 24, 2025, Dr. Hussam was subjected to a targeted and brutal assault. Soldiers stormed Room 1, Section 24 of Ofer Prison, where he was held, and beat him mercilessly for 30 minutes. His rib cage was struck repeatedly. He sustained severe bruises across his face, head, back, and neck.
He asked for medical care—basic tests, treatment, and access to a cardiologist. He was referred, but the request was later denied. Dr. Hussam suffers from irregular heartbeat, yet even this urgent condition is being ignored. The glasses his lawyer recently provided him were also broken during the assault.
He remains underground, in isolation, without sunlight. He is still wearing his winter clothes in the middle of summer, under conditions of starvation, torture, and neglect.
Dr. Hussam Abu Safia is not the only one. All Palestinian prisoners are enduring the same inhumane conditions.




 Tim Veater

Bias can be negative and positive. By this I mean inflating Israel propaganda whilst hiding the reality on the ground. The BBC has demonstrated both. It has destroyed its credibility as a reliable and accurate newsource. It has proved itself as merely a mouthpiece of a zionist controlled American and British foreign policy, rather than objectively and fearlessly reporting the situation to its British and foreign audience. Starmer is obviously controlled by the secret services, a point underlined by the appontment of Blaise Metreweli not only the grand-daughter of notorious German nazi but also apparently embedded in Mossad. For more than two years Starmer's goverment has followed a policy of perfidious dissembling, on the one hand pretending to be concerned for Gazans and stopping the violence, whilst at the same time actively supporting the Israeli genocidal military action which is still continuing to this day. It has refused to condemn Israel's egregious actions or even support the ICJ's view it amounted to 'genocide'. Although not fully revealed, it has provided surveillance aircraft for targeting and mapping, refuelling air tankers, GCHQ intel, facilities for American flights both in Britain and Cyprus, weapon exports and now banning Palestinian demonstration. It has been clear where both government and BBC have stood in this unprecedented humanitarian disaster, and it brings shame on both.

Jay Pullani
Tim Veater - I have copy pasted this article and if you scroll down to read the final paragraph it is obvious what has happened with Labour/Starmer accepting donations and funding from LFI and other donors mentioned. (I have read this but of course do not know if it is true, or propaganda). Stand With Palestine ·
Rashid Siddique ·
Declassified has revealed that around 180 of Britain’s 650 MPs in the last parliament received funding from pro-Israel lobby groups or individuals. This includes 130 Conservative MPs, 41 Labour MPs, and three Liberal Democrats, along with three DUP members, two independents, and Reform’s only MP.
Donations from pro-Israel groups, individuals, and Israeli state institutions total over one million pounds. MPs made over 240 funded trips to Israel, costing over half a million pounds.
Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) is a major funder, with around 80 percent of Tory MPs as members. Over the past decade, CFI has funded 118 sitting Tory MPs to travel to Israel 160 times, spending over £330,000. CFI also organizes private briefings for ministers.
Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) counts about 75 MPs as supporters. LFI has funded 32 Labour MPs to travel to Israel since their election, spending over £64,000.
Labour and Conservative MPs have also received funding from individuals linked to pro-Israel lobby groups. Trevor Chinn, a long-time pro-Israel lobbyist, has financed eight members of Keir Starmer’s front bench. Chinn donated £50,000 to Starmer’s leadership campaign. Gary Lubner, a significant Labour donor described as a “pro-Israel businessperson,” donated £4.5 million to Labour last year, with £350,000 going to the offices of David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Yvette Cooper, and Keir Mather.




Tim Veater
Jay Pullani This evidence of zionist infiltration into British domestic politics is well-known but insufficienty widely known. The funding from the Israeli government and its domestic supporters, to always-greedy and self-interested MPs and political parties, is not philanthropic. It is to ensure the zionist narrative and interest is pursued in parliament and government - and it has worked for decades. Only recently has its corrupt and perverse nature been exposed in the light of an Israeli barbarism, unequalled in modern times. The tide may be turning but it has not as yet reached its apogee. Policy intransigence regarding Gaza, the Middle East, the MI6 appointment already referred to and the banning of 'Palestine Action' as a 'terrorist group', is proof of that!

Tim Veater
Jay Pullani However the relationship extends beyond political and policy influence to much more worrying areas. MOSSAD is recognised as 'primus inter pares' in the terrorist hierarchy. The deep and profound links it has with secret or semi-secret British institutions such as the police, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ as well as the military, is deeply worrying. MOSSAD has a long history of assassinations both at home and abroad. It has organised acts which are 'terrorist' by definition, such as exploding phones in Lebanon and exploding cars in Tehran, to name but two of many, yet these never seem to be called out or condemned in western political and media circles. Indeed quite the opposite: they are presented as ingenious tactical success stories! Over the years I have highlighted the multiple suspicious CIA/MOSSAD/MI6 links to American and European terrorist events, from 9/11 onwards, organised to pursue an Israeli psychological and policy anti-Muslim, anti-Arab agenda. We can be sure that the links that have been revealed conceal far deeper and pernicious ones. Yet again government refuses to acknowledge them. The situation is clearly corrupt and damaging to the true interests of the United Kingdom and its people.

See also:







As we all know, you don't illegally create 100 - 400 nuclear bombs with their rocket powered delivery systems - two quite separate technologies - without thinking about, and planning for, their intended destinations. Americans might be pleased to note their errant child, who for seventy odd years it has cherished and spoiled, has included it on its target list! How the world has allowed such a fanatical and barbarous state to gain such destructive capability, whilst at the same time hypocritically pointing the finger at Iran, defies description. It must qualify as the biggest, shameless and most dangerous con-trick ever pulled.



An intriguing Telegraph article about the so-called 'White Widow' and 'Islamic Terrorism'

Is it just me or am I the only one to find this Telegraph article intriguing and not a little disconcerting? Multiple questions immediately pop up in my head. Do they in yours. I will explain why.


Why is the ‘White Widow’ of the 7/7 bombings still at large?


by Gordon Rayner  Dated: Mon. 7th July, 2025 re-posted in full by AOL same day



When a 19-year-old carpet fitter called Germaine Lindsay blew himself up on a Piccadilly line Underground train on July 7 2005, he claimed the lives of 26 passengers in the deadliest of four co-ordinated suicide attacks that changed Britain forever.

Yet in the 20 years that have elapsed since then, his bloody legacy may have been outstripped by the heavily pregnant wife he left behind. Samantha Lewthwaite, the white, Christian-born daughter of a former British soldier, has been accused of involvement in more than 240 murders in multiple terrorist attacks in Africa.

Lewthwaite, or Asmaa Shahidah as she is believed to be known in one of her many aliases, has so far managed to evade the world’s intelligence agencies, who have little idea of where she is, who is hiding her, or even whether she is still alive. She has reached almost mythical status as the so-called “White Widow” of Islamist terrorism, with a folklore building up around her that is precious propaganda for al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate she is now part of. Her life story is, controversially, being made into a feature film called Girl Next Door.

Lewthwaite, now 41, is accused of planning, funding, or taking part in the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi that killed 71 people in 2013; the 2015 massacre of 148 people at Garissa University in Kenya, and a grenade attack on a bar in Mombasa that killed three people watching an England football match in 2012. Then, in 2019 she was linked to a terrorist attack on a hotel in Nairobi that claimed 22 lives.

Depending on who you speak to, she was either instrumental in these attacks or had little to do with them. But those who know her believe she revels in the notoriety of being linked to them. Whatever the truth about her activities, one thing that is not in dispute is that she was able to slip out of Britain unchallenged – not once but twice – despite suspicions from day one that she was in on the 7/7 bomb plot, and that she has made fools of MI6, the CIA and police forces on two continents ever since.

https://cf.eip.telegraph.co.uk/store/vid-media/a74e95d2/fallback/a74e95d2-mp4-fallback.mp4 Credit: ITN/Getty Images

In 2012 Kenya issued an arrest warrant for her on charges of possessing bomb-making material and conspiring to make an explosive device with intent to cause harm, and to this day she remains the subject of an Interpol red notice, or international arrest warrant, one of only 13 Britons on the Interpol list.

The Telegraph has spoken to those who have tracked her movements across East Africa, in an attempt to piece together a picture of the life she is now living, with latest intelligence suggesting she is in an al-Shabaab-controlled area of Somalia, where she trains female terrorist operatives.

We have also interviewed those who tried to bring her to justice for the crimes she is suspected of committing over the course of two decades, to try to understand what made a “jolly child” from a Buckinghamshire market town dedicate her life – and seemingly the lives of her children – to Islamist terrorism.

What emerges is a picture of a woman who is far from the one-dimensional monster we tend to assume all terrorists must be. She is simultaneously a girly, almost childish, mother of four who listens to Beyoncé, habitually doodles love hearts on shopping lists and reminds herself to “look fabulous” for social occasions, while also jotting down her commitment to “terrorising the disbelievers”. The fact that she can switch between the two makes her all the more unfathomable. It is, however, possible to plot the milestones and the decisions that transformed her from unremarkable Home Counties schoolgirl to Islamist terrorist.

‘An average girl who liked a good laugh’


Samantha Lewthwaite as a schoolgirl and Abdullah el-Faisal Grab - Alamy, Getty Images, Shutterstock


Her story, perhaps significantly, begins amid terrorism, in the Northern Ireland of the Troubles, where her father, Andrew Lewthwaite, was serving in the 9th/12th Royal Lancers of the British Army in the 1970s when he met and married local girl Elizabeth Allen.

Samantha was born on December 5 1983, the youngest of three children, and spent her early childhood in Banbridge, Co Down.

The family later moved to Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, but the Lewthwaites’ marriage failed and when Samantha was 11 her parents divorced. Friends say she was badly affected by the break-up, and spent much of her time seeking solace at the home of her best friend, a Muslim classmate.

Perhaps attracted by the strength of her friend’s family bond, in contrast to her own fractured home life, or perhaps, as some believe, because she fell in love with a local Muslim boy, she converted to Islam at the age of 17, changing her name to Sherafiyah, wearing a hijab to school and putting further distance between herself and her parents, who struggled to come to terms with her decision.

Raj Khan, who knew Lewthwaite as a child and went on to become Aylesbury’s mayor, remembered her as “a jolly child, and a really good person. She would do anything to help other people”.

Niknam Hussain, who is related to the Muslim family Lewthwaite befriended and would often see her when he visited them, recalls “a perfectly normal suburban Aylesbury girl” who was bright, who “wasn’t a leader, just an average girl who liked a good laugh”. He says: “I know lots of teenagers now who are more politically engaged than she was. She would just be doing her homework or playing board games or going to the park.”

A week before the bombings, Hussain, who has been a councillor in Aylesbury since 1999, was introduced to Germaine Lindsay by a local community leader.

“He was standing by a Transit van and I was introduced to him because Samantha had been in touch with me about their housing because she was expecting another baby,” he says.

“He just sort of said ‘OK, yeah’. He was passive, quiet, and the group he prayed with were in no way radicals. There are people you see standing on street corners with megaphones and handing out leaflets, but he wasn’t like that and nor was she. There was just nothing to suggest he was going to do what he did.”

David Videcette, a former Metropolitan Police anti-terrorism officer who spent years on the Lewthwaite case, says: “I don’t think anyone really understood why she converted. A lot of things with her were never really explained. Maybe it was in search of an identity she didn’t think she had.”

Aylesbury is not a place associated with radicalisation, but it is a short train ride away from London, and the mosques that were controlled in the early 2000s by a roster of hate preachers. Lewthwaite fell under the influence of Jamaican Muslim convert Trevor Forrest, AKA Abdullah el-Faisal, who is currently serving an 18-year sentence in the United States for terrorist offences. His followers included 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, shoe bomber Richard Reid and, more pertinently to this story, Germaine Lindsay and 7/7 plot leader Mohammad Sidique Khan.

Before his most recent incarceration, el-Faisal told a BBC documentary that: “[Lindsay] came across as an introvert… like many young black males, they want a father figure… I became someone that he took his Islamic knowledge from.” Lindsay, who had converted to Islam after his mother did so, also wanted a wife.

In the autumn of 2002 Lindsay was given Lewthwaite’s email address, they chatted online and arranged to meet at a Stop The War march in London that September. Weeks later, on October 30 2002, they married in an Islamic ceremony in Lindsay’s front room in Huddersfield using the Islamic names Jamal and Asmantara. Lindsay was just 17 at the time, Lewthwaite was 19. The marriage, conducted by an imam, was not legally recognised and her parents refused to attend.

The couple settled down in Aylesbury and Lindsay got work as a carpet fitter, while Lewthwaite dropped out of a politics and religion degree she had started at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University of London), to concentrate on being a Muslim wife and raising a family. Their first child, Abdullah, was born in April 2004 and Lewthwaite was soon expecting another baby.

‘We should have arrested her, we should have prosecuted her’


Left: Former anti-terror officer David Videcette. Right: Shahzad Tanweer, Germaine Lindsay and Mohammed Sidique Khan entering Luton train station on a practice run for 7/7 - Getty Images, Shutterstock


By July 2005, the month of 7/7, she was eight months pregnant, yet police believe she was not only aware that her husband was planning on becoming a suicide bomber, but actively supported the idea. It is, apart from anything else, the only logical explanation for the fact that she failed to report her husband missing for six days after the bombings.

Videcette, who led the force’s intelligence-gathering operation in the wake of the attacks, says: “We searched the home addresses of the four suspects and the only one of them that had been reported missing was Hasib Hussain [the 18-year-old Tavistock Square bus bomber]. Samantha Lewthwaite hadn’t reported Lindsay missing. She didn’t show any initial concern about why he hadn’t come home.”

Recalling Lewthwaite’s police interviews, he adds: “There were a number of people who were clearly telling lies and Samantha was one of them. There were people who had participated in helping arrange for premises to be available to the bombers and so on, and Samantha fell into that category. “It also became clear that she had travelled with Lindsay to Leeds [the home of two of the bombers] and Dewsbury [the home of Khan], and had very likely been in the company of all of the bombers at some point. She knew in advance and she really didn’t care whether they were coming back or not.

“The men in this world can’t go about their business without female support. I don’t think she is or was a planner, but killing yourself is difficult, to stay on that path without the right encouragement, and I think she provided that encouragement, telling [Lindsay] he will be rewarded in the afterlife.”

That was not the version of events she told to The Sun newspaper when it paid her £30,000 for a much-criticised interview two months after the bombings, in which she insisted that she and her children were also victims and that Lindsay’s actions had been “abhorrent”.

Her actions suggested otherwise. When Lewthwaite gave birth to her daughter Ruqayyah shortly after the bombings, she gave her the middle name Shahidah, which means “martyr” (her eldest child also has the male form, Shaheed, as a middle name).

Videcette says: “She seemed very proud of the fact that she was involved with this and had lived this life with a suicide bomber and was quite in your face. That bothered me, it was galling.”

Another giveaway was that in 2006, while living under police protection following a firebomb attack on her home, she started travelling to Long Lartin prison in Worcestershire, where she was visiting none other than Abdullah el-Faisal, the hate preacher who inspired Lindsay, who was serving a nine-year sentence for urging his followers to murder “unbelievers”.

El-Faisal later recalled that despite being widowed: “She didn’t seem like she was sad or had the weight of the world on her shoulders, she was jovial, she looked happy.” They often spoke on the phone when she could not make it in person to the maximum-security jail.

Videcette, among others, believes there was plenty of evidence to arrest Lewthwaite and that she could have been prosecuted as an accomplice, yet he says that “at a very senior level” there was a resistance to making early arrests. The security services wanted to gain as much intelligence as they could, particularly after the attempted suicide bombings two weeks after 7/7, on July 21 2005, led to fears of wave after wave of suicide attacks, so Lewthwaite remained, officially at least, on the list of witnesses rather than suspects.

One theory that has emerged in the years since then is that MI5 wanted to keep Lewthwaite “in play” so they could monitor her movements and see if she led them to other terrorists, which would certainly explain why, when the police finally began rounding up suspected accomplices in 2007, she was not among them.

“We should have arrested her, we should have prosecuted her, but we were never allowed to do so,” says Videcette. “Instead she was just allowed to go off and do whatever she wanted to do.” Rather than leading the security services to a prize catch, Lewthwaite left Britain for Africa, a land of opportunity for Islamist killers.

We can only guess at what el-Faisal said to Lewthwaite during her visits to him in Long Lartin prison, or the extent to which it might have triggered another escalation in her fanaticism. But what we do know is that she was hand-picked by him to marry another jihadist.

Having been released from prison in 2007, el-Faisal had embarked on an international preaching tour, and during a meeting with followers in South Africa, he later recalled: “One of the men expressed a desire to marry a British girl, a white sister… so I immediately thought of Samantha.

“I picked up my mobile and I rang her and I said, ‘I’ve found you a potential husband.’”

Lewthwaite spent the next six weeks talking on the phone to the “potential husband” and then, in July 2008, caught a flight to Johannesburg with her two children, then aged four and two, where the following day she married Fahmi Salim, a Kenyan with family links to al-Qaeda. What attracted her to him was revealed in her own words in a journal later discovered by police.

She wrote: “Allah blessed me with the best husband for me, in fact exactly what I’d asked for when I made du’a [prayer] before marriage. I asked for a man who would go forth, give all he could for Allah’s cause and spend a life terrorising the disbelievers as they have us.”

‘Seek the victory until we are martyred’


Jermaine Grant named Lewthwaite as a member of his terror cell after he was arrested - Getty Images, Reuters, Shutterstock


Just as she had done with Lindsay, she outwardly appeared to have settled down to family life, working as the assistant manager of a halal pie factory in Johannesburg, driving a white Mercedes, and living in a middle-class neighbourhood.

In secret though, she was supporting her husband’s terrorist activities. She was by now living under a new name, Natalie Faye Webb, complete with an identity card bought from a corrupt official. The real Webb was a British nurse who had no idea she was the victim of identity theft.

Although her husband was ostensibly running a medical supplies business, Lewthwaite wrote in her journal about the pain of being separated from him for long periods, and of not knowing whether he would return, or whether he had become a “martyr”.

In July 2009 she returned to the UK to have her third child, a son called Abdur-Rahman, taking advantage of the NHS maternity care provided by Stoke Mandeville Hospital. No father was named on the birth certificate but it is believed to be Salim. A fourth child, daughter Surajah, was born in South Africa in July 2010, also thought to be by Salim.

Where most parents would dream about their children’s future happiness, Lewthwaite had other hopes for her growing brood.

She wrote in her journal: “Recently my beloved husband gave a talk to my eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. He asked them what do you want to be when you are older? Both had many answers but both agreed to one of wanting to be a mujahid [person engaged in jihad].” She was about to begin a new phase in her personal war on non-Muslims.

The following year, using a South African passport obtained using her Natalie Webb identity, Lewthwaite moved with her husband to his home town of Mombasa, Kenya, where they became part of an al-Shabaab (which means “the youth”) terrorist cell and gathered ingredients to make a bomb.

Police got wind of the plot and in December 2011 raided a house in Mombasa – a city with strong historic links to al-Qaeda – and found bomb-making materials similar to those used by Lindsay on 7/7. They arrested a British man, Jermaine Grant, who was later jailed, but not before he named Lewthwaite as the senior member of his terrorist cell. “There is someone much bigger you really want,” he told them. “She is the financier.”

Kenyan police raided a second address linked to the cell and found a white woman living there, who calmly invited them in. She showed them her identity – Natalie Faye Webb – and the police left, assuming their intelligence was wrong.

By the time they realised their mistake, hours later, Lewthwaite had fled. It remains the last confirmed sighting of her by any law enforcement agency anywhere in the world.

A search of the house revealed a copy of Lewthwaite’s birth certificate, as well as a laptop and SD cards containing family photos and the journal in which she jotted down everything from her shopping lists to her deep love for Osama bin Laden.

One page, written in red pen and covered in love heart doodles, is titled “what will need [sic]” and lists items including blenders, cups and umbrellas for what appears to be a forthcoming drinks party. She adds at the bottom: “Look fabulous sexcee.”

On another page, she had written a 34-line ode to bin Laden, penned after he was killed by US forces. “My love for you is like no other,” she wrote. “Us we are left to continue what you started. To seek the victory until we are martyred. To instil terror into kuffar [non-believers].”

The naivety of her verse is the one theme that links her sinister desire for mass murder with her childish scribblings elsewhere. She comes across as desperate for attention and validation, particularly from men, like a lovelorn teenager who has never grown up.

‘Like a Jihadi Bonnie and Clyde’


Lewthwaite has been linked to the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi that killed 71 people - The Times / News Licensing, Getty Images


Attention came to her in spades as a result of the string of terrorist attacks with which she was linked in the 2010s. When gunmen attacked the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi in September 2013, several survivors claimed to have seen a white woman among the attackers, barking orders in English.

The previous year, when an unidentified terrorist bombed the Jericho pub in Mombasa while it was screening the Euro 2012 quarter final football match between England and Italy, killing three people, witnesses described seeing a white woman firing a grenade launcher. One even picked out Lewthwaite from a photo line-up.

Yet investigators insisted there was no evidence she – or any woman – was involved in either. Lewthwaite became a spectral figure who loomed over terrorism in Kenya. There were rumours that she was al-Qaeda’s financier in East Africa; that she had formed an all-female jihadi ring, travelling with her young children in tow; that she was linked to plots to blow up Eton College, the Dorchester and the Ritz London .

“So many legends were attached to her name, she was like a Jihadi Bonnie and Clyde,” says a security official who investigated her activities as part of a multinational effort to counter al-Shabaab operations along the East African coast.

https://cf.eip.telegraph.co.uk/store/vid-media/b9608600/fallback/b9608600-mp4-fallback.mp4

Credit: Reuters

Matt Bryden, a Horn of Africa expert who led counterterrorism co-ordination for the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, a coalition of eight African countries, says: “She supported Jermaine Grant and his associates. She rented apartments, procured sim cards and IDs. She was an operator but not a leader and certainly not the kind of lethal international assassin that she was portrayed as being.”

Bryden believes it is possible she carried out reconnaissance – visiting targets and taking photographs.

“She was an important assistant in a number of operations, even if she didn’t carry out the operations herself,” says one Kenyan security source.

After her cover was blown by the 2011 raid on her home, she is known to have fled to the failed state of Somalia, the only place she could be certain the authorities could not get to her.

Reliable intelligence on her life and movements deep inside al-Shabaab-controlled territory is hard to come by, which is why her involvement in the 2015 Garissa University attack and the 2019 hotel attack in Nairobi is largely a matter of speculation.

She is said to have been in a relationship with British bomb-maker Habib Ghani, who was later killed in a gun battle in Somalia. Another rumoured husband was Abdi Wahid, a Kenyan naval officer who turned to terrorism, while other reports suggest she married Hassan Maalim Ibrahim, a senior al-Shabaab operative. In 2022 it was reported that she had fled Somalia for Yemen after she split up with him. Others think she may be in Tanzania calling herself Asmaa.

According to one Somali source with connections to operatives in al-Shabaab, six years ago she was one of several wives of a polygamous husband and was teaching at an al-Shabaab indoctrination centre for women in the terrorist group’s southern Somali stronghold of Lower Shabelle.

“She was teaching and training many women in the group, a mixture of Somalis and non-Somalis,” the source says. “She was teaching them English and also about the ideology of the group.

“The last I heard, she was doing very well. The place she was teaching, one can’t really dignify it by calling it a school, was essentially a place for radicalising people. Young people who go in there come out as extremists.”

Her female acolytes were being taught English by her in order to enter English-speaking Kenya as spies and honey traps, the source said, as well as grooming recruits in English-speaking countries online.

“A lot of them are sent out, especially in Kenya, to fish for male targets,” the source said. “The women will do what women have to do to get information out of a man who has information.”

Abdisalam Guled, who was the deputy director of Somalia’s National Intelligence Security Agency from 2013-17, tried to track her movements within the country and believes she moved to an area 60 miles inside al-Shabaab-controlled territory.

He believes she became part of al-Shabaab’s decision-making and executive team and participated in its Shura council, which is highly unusual for a woman.

He says: “It suggests that she had special leverage or influence that compelled the group to include her at the executive level – something beyond her being white, British, or a martyr’s wife, in my opinion.

“Rumours circulated that she was married to several al-Shabaab leaders.”

Guled rejects the idea that Lewthwaite’s importance is an illusion: he believes she is, or was, trusted at the highest levels of al-Shabaab. He even goes so far as to say that she may have been one of the highest-ranking al-Shabaab operatives in East Africa.

Abukar Arman, Somalia’s former special envoy to the US from 2010-13, says: “Both the US and UK were telling Somali authorities they weren’t doing enough to capture the White Widow. Bear in mind at that time Somalia did not even have a functioning army and didn’t even fully control Mogadishu – the seat of power for the government.

“They [US and UK] would even say that they would cut certain programmes in Somalia due to what they viewed as the Somali government not doing enough to capture the White Widow.”

Little to nothing has been heard of Lewthwaite for the past six years, and none of her family wanted to talk about her when they were approached by The Telegraph.

David Videcette is among those who thinks she is dead, and says he was told she was killed in a strike that was targeting a group of other senior al-Shabaab members.

“I think that’s where the story ends, but it might not,” he says. “It worries me that we still don’t understand much about Samantha. It worries me that the security services didn’t appear to have much information about her. How does a convert come into this world [of terrorism], and operate fairly freely, and go to another country and seemingly do it all over again? How is that possible?”END