'White Widow' Samantha LewthwaiteOne British newspaper revealed that the “White Widow” was actually leading it and had been witnessed in a veil, “shouting instructions in Arabic”. It did not say why she should be using that language to a group who spoke Somali and, many of them, seemingly, English. Kenyan officials pointed out that the fighters were all men, although some of them had gone into Westgate pretending to be women, dressed in niqabs.
Later, however, Kenya's Foreign Minister, Amina Mohamed, contradicted this by telling US television that a British woman experienced in terrorist activities was involved in the siege, fuelling the speculation surrounding Lewthwaite.
In an interview with PBS she said: "From the information that we have, two or three Americans (were involved) and I think, so far, I have heard of one Brit... a woman ... and I think she has done this many times before."
Kenyan soldiers officers at the stand-off in Nairobi Lewthwaite, 29, who grew up in Aylesbury, is not known to the law-enforcement agencies as a combatant. She is, however, seen as a facilitator and is wanted in connection with a plot to blow up a shopping centre and hotels in Mombasa two years ago. She is believed still to be engaged in clandestine activity.
UK security sources said they could not rule out that she had been involved, although it was likely to be behind the scenes. A tweet, purportedly from al-Shabaab, announced she had taken part, but its provenance could not be verified.An associate of Lewthwaite, Habib Ghani, a UK citizen from Hounslow in west London, is reported to have been shot dead along with Omar Hammami, an American from Alabama with a Syrian mother, in an al-Shabaab internal feud earlier this month.
Ghani, of Pakistani and Kenyan extraction, went on the run after Kenyan police arrested another Briton, Jermaine Grant, in Mombasa over alleged possession of explosives.
Smoke rises over the mall yesterday The largest group of foreign fighters is said to have come from various parts of the US including the states of Kansas, Maine, and Illinois, and the city of Minneapolis. According to evidence before the US Congress, a number of mosques in the cities of Minneapolis and St Paul were running recruitment programmes and sending volunteers to fight in Somalia.
The FBI is said to have launched an investigation into the American connection in the attack, but questions will be asked as to why Western intelligence agencies failed to track the gathering of international jihadists in Nairobi.