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| WHITE WIDOW |
The terror suspect, nicknamed the 'White Widow', is believed to have first travelled to the country in 2008, a year after her suicide bomber husband Germaine Lindsay committed the July 7 attacks in London.
Two years later on July 24, 2010, Lewthwaite, who is now subject to an Interpol arrest warrant, gave birth to a girl called Surajah whose father is the suspected al-Shabaab terrorist Abdi Wahid.
The hardline Islamic couple paid cash for use of the upmarket Genesis clinic, booking under false names.
Lewthwaite, then aged 26, gave her name as Asmaa Shahidah Bint-Andrews while Wahid used the pseudonym Adam Omar. The clinic is situated in an exclusive Johannesburg suburb called Saxonwold, it boasts eight private rooms with double beds, marble bathrooms and private gardens for patients.
According to staff at the clinic, Lewthwaite, a soldier's daughter from Aylesurby, Buckinghamshire, opted for a water birth with her husband and three other children present. She attended appointments prior to the birth wearing a nijab, leaving only her eyes visible, although staff said the Brit would remove her veil once the consultations has begun.The couple paid for an 'Early Bird' deal costing just 6,000 South African Rand, around £380, which meant they could stay for six hours after the birth, rather than the standard two nights.
On the its website, the clinic says it aims to 'envelop patients in luxury.'
A statement reads: 'At Genesis, the environment and service is designed to make you feel comfortable, safe and enveloped in luxury while ensuring optimum care for you and your precious newborn. 'The whole idea of an active birth unit is to combine the benefits of labouring and birthing outside of the pressure of a hospital environment with the necessary advantage of having immediate and first class medical care at hand should complications arise.
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, the midwife who treated Lewthwaite said the wanted woman had described herself as a 'housewife'. She said: 'She came to me quite late in her pregnancy. She said that she was from the UK and had three kids already. She said she wanted a midwife-assisted delivery because that's how they do it in the UK. 'She told me that (her husband) had a contract in South Africa for two years. I think she said he worked in the media. 'She told me she was a housewife and always had been. As I recall, she came from a broken home and that was why she converted to Islam.'
Lewthwaite was registered at four separate addresses in the Mayfair area of Johannesburg, under the name Natalie Faye Webb. The revelations of Lewthwaite's secret life come just days after files found on the fugitive's laptop portrayed her as a normal and loving mother.Among those snaps were pictures showing her family in the Genesis clinic including Wahid. They are alongside the two children Lewthwaite had with terrorist Lindsay, a son Abdullah, now nine, and daughter Ruqayyah, eight.
Lewthwaite, 29, has been on the run since December 2011 after being linked to a plan to bomb luxury tourist resorts in the Kenyan coastal resort of Mombasa. She has also been linked to last month’s horrific terror attack on a Nairobi shopping mall which killed more than 70 people.
The mother of four is the subject of an international manhunt by nearly 200 countries after she was named in a Red Alert by Interpol following the atrocity in Nairobi, which was carried out by gunmen linked to the Al Shabaab terror group. The family pictures, taken in July 2010, and discovered by British anti-terrorist investigators on a discarded computer in Kenya, reveal Lewthwaite’s softer side, but locked in the hard-drive of the laptop and a memory stick, officers made more chilling discoveries.
They found Lewthwaite had spent eight years researching bomb-making and searching for the deadly chemicals used to make improvised explosives devices. And they discovered a poem she wrote, praising the ideology of Al Qaeda mastermind Osama Bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan by US troops in May 2011. Typed clumsily after his death, Lewthwaite proclaims her love for the terrorist chief.
She wrote: ‘Oh Sheik Osama my father, my brother / My love for you is like no other / Oh Sheik Osama now that you are gone / The Muslims must wake up they must be strong.’
The family photos were taken while Lewthwaite was living in South African, working in a halal pie factory under the false name of Natalie Faye Webb. She is believed to have moved to Kenya in 2007, just months after she condemned the deadly role her husband Lindsay played in the 7/7 London bombings that killed 52.
She moved to South Africa in 2008 and adopted the identity of an unsuspecting young woman who had moved to the UK with her parents as a baby.
The Briton later fled the country, through Tanzania, establishing a base in Mombasa, Kenya, where she is believed to have become a senior figure in Al Shabaab.Lewthwaite went into hiding in December 2011 after she convinced anti-terror police to let her go when she was arrested following a raid on an Al Shabaab cell.
Her British accomplice Jermaine Grant, from London, is on trial in Kenya for terrorist offences.
Ghani, 28, from Hounslow, Middlesex, was killed in a gun battle in Somalia last month after falling out with senior Al Shabaab members. He had called himself Osama al-Britani.
Lewthwaite is known to her followers as dada mzungu – Swahili for white sister. It is claimed she has become the ‘trainer’ of an all-female suicide bomber squad targeting Westerners in East Africa. Her appointment was announced on a website sympathetic to Al Shabaab, which revealed that Lewthwaite ‘gave her life to Allah and now she serves Allah as his female soldier in [Somalia]’, where she ‘commands her all-female mujahid terror squad and conducts operations against the kuffar [non-Muslims]’.
Earlier this year Lewthwaite broke cover with a Twitter rant at a fellow fanatic. She called fugitive Omar Hammadi, who has since been killed, ‘an irritating prat’. It stemmed from a feud involving US-born Hammadi and former allies in the Al Shabaab network. Hammadi dismissed Lewthwaite as merely ‘a girl in Kenya’. Lewthwaite hit back: ‘Yes, am a girl in Kenya like dat makes a difference u misogynist!’ And in a reference to Mujahideen holy war fanatics, she added: ‘Fyi sam lewthwaite thinks u r a irritating obnoxious contemptible little Muj PRAT.’
In the wake of 7/7, Lewthwaite portrayed herself as another victim of the tragedy, describing the attack as ‘abhorrent’. She claimed to have had no knowledge of the plans and dreaded the day she would have to tell her children ‘what their father did’.
But earlier this month, the Daily Mail revealed a manifesto for terrorism that Lewthwaite wrote, describing her need to murder disbelievers and inciting others – including her children – to do the same. The nine-page document revealed how she was grooming her four children to follow in the footsteps of Lindsay.
She wrote how she was ‘blessed’ to have had a holy warrior husband and of how she had sacrificed her comfortable Western life to fight non-Muslims.
She said: ‘Allah blessed me with the best husband for me. In fact, exactly what I asked for . . . before marriage.’
Lewthwaite is thought to be in hiding in Tanzania or Somalia.
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