Woman turned house to bomb factory

Samantha Lewthwaite, the “White Widow” made bombs in a magnificent home after marrying Kenyan Abdi Wahid two years ago.

Located in the affluent Shanzu neighbourhood in Mombasa’s North Coast and near five star hotels, the posh house passes for the residence of a person of means.

It is surrounded by a two metre stone wall. Going by the value of property in the area, the homes are worth more than Sh20 million. On Tuesday, the house was bolted from inside.

After knocking on the gate for a few minutes, a caretaker peeped through a hole on the door but quickly closed it when a journalist tried to move closer.

It was in this house that Lewthwaite stayed with Wahid, a former Kenya Navy officer.

Her first husband, terrorist Jermaine Lindsay, blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Britain in July 2007.

BOMB FACTORY

According to a confidential Scotland Yard file quoted by the Daily Mail, Wahid was arrested in 2011 when police discovered that his house in Mombasa had been turned into a bomb factory by Lewthwaite and her associates.

He was previously identified as her landlord, the paper reported, noting that it was not clear how much he knew about his wife’s terrorist activities.

The paper adds that his relationship with Lewthwaite “has baffled detectives, given his military background and because he once worked as a private security officer in Afghanistan, guarding Westerners against attacks from the Taliban.”

Lewthwaite’s two elder children with Lindsay, nine-year-old Abdullah and Ruqayyah, eight, have the middle names Shaheed and Shahidah which means “martyr” in the male and female form, according to the police data, the Daily Mail reported.

She has two other children, according to the paper — four-year-old Abdur-Rahman and three-year-old Surajah — whose father could be another British Al-Shabaab recruit, Hounslow-born Habib Saleh Ghani, 28, killed in Somalia last month.