The friends and family of a radicalised British housewife from “leafy Buckinghamshire” have reacted with shock and disbelief to claims that she is behind the Kenyan shopping mall massacre.
Speculation is rife that terror suspect Samantha Lewthwaite, who was married to the July 7 suicide bomber Jermaine Lindsay, was one of the masterminds behind the atrocity which has claimed more than 60 lives.
Known as the White Widow, the 29-year-old mother-of-three is the daughter of an English soldier.
She enjoyed an unremarkable childhood in Banbridge, Co Down, before moving to Aylesbury at a young age.
After converting to Islam at 17, Lewthwaite changed her name to Sherafiyah and married Lindsay, who detonated the bomb at King’s Cross Tube station, killing 26 people in July 2005.
She claimed to have been horrified by the killings, but in 2009 disappeared with her children and resurfaced two years later after travelling to Kenya on a false passport.
Kenya’s foreign minister, Amina Mohamed, has fuelled further speculation by claiming a British woman who has allegedly been involved in terrorism “many times before” was among the militants who laid siege to the Westgate mall, leaving at least six Britons dead.
The shock waves reached Banbridge, where Lewthwaite’s grandmother, Elizabeth Allen, was taken to hospital.
Joan Baird, a veteran Ulster Unionist councillor in Banbridge who knows the family, said: “This is so distressing for everyone. Mrs Allen is 85 and she is in and out of hospital. It is just so distressing.”
In Aylesbury there was disbelief. Councillor Raj Khan, who knew Lewthwaite socially, said: “She was not strong-headed. And that’s why I find it absolutely amazing that she is supposed to be the head of an international criminal terrorist organisation.”