7/7 bomber widow Samantha Lewthwaite ‘financed Kenya tourist terror plot’

Grant, from Newham, east London, was arrested in December at a flat in a
rundown suburb of Mombasa in which police found chemicals, batteries and an
electric switch.

The materials are very similar to those used by Lewthwaite’s former husband,
Germaine Lindsay, and the other 7/7 bombers in their attacks on a London bus
and three Tube trains that killed 52 people.

Witnesses, neighbours and police sources have all in the past said that they
saw Grant and a woman matching Lewthwaite’s description together in Mombasa
in November and December last year.

She is understood to have paid rent, sometimes several months upfront, for a
series of “safe houses” in Mombasa used by the alleged terrorist cell. Grant
stayed in at least two of those houses.

The source of the money is not known, but there were reports that she spent
time in Somalia before travelling to Kenya, and that she worked there with
agents of al-Shabaab.

At Grant’s trial yesterday, Mombasa chief magistrate Joyce Gandani heard how
Grant approached a Kenyan friend, Hassan Mohamed Haj, and said he was
looking for a wife.

In testimony before the court, Mr Haj said that he met Grant at a mosque in
central Mombasa late last year and they became friends.

“He told me he was a Canadian man, a businessman dealing in cars and mobile
phones, and that he wanted to get married,” Mr Haj said.

After a week of meeting different Kenyan women, he agreed to marry Warda Brek
Islam, a 19-year-old school leaver from the city.

She was arrested on the same day as Grant was taken into custody, which was
the day after their wedding. Islam faces the same charges as Grant. All four
of the accused deny the charges.

Lewthwaite disappeared the day after police found her at the house of the
widow of Musa Hussein Abdi, a wanted al-Qaeda agent killed in Mogadishu last
year alongside Fazul Abdullah, the suspected mastermind of the 1998 US
Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Lewthwaite claimed that she was an innocent tourist visiting a friend, and
produced a faked South African passport in the name Natalie Faye Webb.

Mr Ondari confirmed yesterday that the woman Kenyan police originally thought
was Natalie Faye Webb was in fact Samantha Lewthwaite. The real Natalie Faye
Webb is a nurse from Essex whose identity was stolen, and who has no links
to terrorists.

When police returned the day after they first found her, Lewthwaite had fled
with her three children. Her laptop was recovered and is understood to have
been combed by Scotland Yard officers for evidence against Grant.

Lewthwaite is still on the run. A senior Kenyan anti-terror police officer
told The Daily Telegraph that she was most likely in Somalia, where “there
is too much chaos for us to be able to find her”.

Grant’s case in Mombasa was adjourned yesterday until August 15.

Grant is separately charged in a Nairobi court with robbery with violence and
escaping custody in a case dating back to 2008. He denies the charges.

He has already pleaded guilty to using a fake name and being in Kenya
illegally, for which he is currently serving a three-year prison sentence.

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