Original subtitles

The 7th of July in 2005,

I remember it was a Thursday.

It was so crowded I didn't need to hold onto anything, I could just...

Stand there and lean on other people.

Within a few seconds of the train moving

off from king's cross station...

Um... there was a... Like a flash and then...

Total darkness.

Breaking news from the pa newswire

that there's been reports of an explosion

in the east end of London.

I knew instantly it was a terrorist attack.

Twenty-five out of 52 innocent people were killed in my carriage.

Central London? Has been rocked

by a series of terrorist attacks.

A number of people have died,

and they say among the injured are many different nationalities.

Three hundred injured, 45 of them seriously.

Police confirmed explosives were found there.

There is a suggestion that the explosion was caused

by a suicide bomber.

Then that would be the first suicide bomber

to have struck in the United Kingdom.

Germaine was responsible for the deaths of 26 people.

I started delving into his background...

And found out that he was married to Samantha lewthwaite.

Samantha lewthwaite, known as the white widow.

Samantha was married to one of the London bombers

and she's made a name for herself as a terrorism mastermind.

She may now be the most wanted woman in the world.

She was everything.

She was planner...

...she was motivator, she was organizer

in the al-shabaab movement and in general, in east Africa.

She understood the nuances of avoiding observation and surveillance.

And I think she got a kick out of it.

She beat US.

We couldn't prosecute her. We tried and failed.

If I had an opportunity to arrest her, I would.

But I don't think she's a woman who will give up easily.

Neither am I.

Lewthwaite was named "the white widow"

after the death of her husband, germaine Lindsay,

one of the London suicide bombers.

She's been on the run for the last four years.

After the bombings

when the identities of the terrorists became known...

Samantha was under extreme pressure.

She had questions to answer.

No, not just to the police. To her friends and family, people that knew her.

"What did you know about this, Samantha?"

First time I met her,

we took her to a place... It was a manor house.

And the manor house rented out a number of cottages in the grounds.

Rolling green fields, there was a river running nearby.

So we were sitting outside on a lovely, lovely hot day, expecting Samantha.

When she arrived in a... in a taxi with her, newly-born child and--

we were quite surprised to see that

when she got out that she had the full hi-- hijab on.

Which was massively out of keeping

with the, local community and the local area.

Eventually she agreed to, uncover her face.

Everybody wanted to talk to her. Yes, it was a great scoop.

She was a white western convert.

She painted herself as a naive victim of her husband's crime.

She made the statement that obviously, the bombings were abhorrent.

That she could not believe that her husband was able to do this.

The first time Samantha lewthwaite met germaine Lindsay

was at a "stop the war" march.

The fact that she met her husband at one of these marches is significant.

The resentment of British and US invasion of Iraq

was one of the defining factors for the group to conduct the 7/7 bombings.

She obviously has connections with the sentiment

of why her husband and his group members would want to carry out this attack.

We spent three days with her, doing the interviewing.

The very fact that she'd been intensively interviewed by the police

and no suspicion had been cast on her story at all.

There was never allegations that she was involved.

So everything kind of

fitted with her story that she'd just been taken in.

In hindsight, when I look back at it, she was clearly putting on an act.

But at the time I believed every word of it.

Samantha lewthwaite played dumb, if you like.

She played very like: "I'm just the wife."

"There was nothing untoward about, our relationship."

But, um, very quickly, um...

We could get a bit of an idea

that some of the stories people like Samantha lewthwaite

were telling US, probably weren't true.

Some of the... Hasib hussain's family, for example,

he was one of the other bombers,

you know, straight away, they were on the phone:

"Our son is on a... on a day trip?Down in London today, we're worried about him."

Samantha lewthwaite? "No, I'm not-- I'm not bothered.

Seven days later I'll ring the police."

Why is she not thinking, "my god, where's my husband?

I'm seven months pregnant.

I'm seven months pregnant, yet my husband hasn't come home."

She named the child that was born after the bombing, "shahid."

Shahid means, it's an honorific term for a... a martyr.

You know, she's called her child "martyr"...

Effectively, um, after... and she's supposed to be disgusted...

About what her husband's done.

I really pressed hard to have her arrested.

You know, I really, really wanted her on the suspect list.

Sadly, the senior investigating officer...

Felt that there wasn't enough evidence to proceed.

And that the cps would say no.

And I massively regret that she... gets this opportunity to kill other people.

Of course, I think about it every single day.

And then, quite clearly, when you look at what happened in mombasa.

She beat US.

We had the intelligence that there were some guys

who were planning an attack in mombasa.

So we needed to move fast

to preempt that kind of action.

Through our surveillance, we had already known the houses where they were staying.

So we had to move to that house.

It was a two bedroom house.

It was an orphanage and there was only a mattress on the floor.

And some containers.

They had acetone, hydrogen peroxide.

Power source, that is the battery. We had a switch altimeter...

We just automatically knew that these were explosive making... materials.

After analyzing some of the documents found in that house

we were able to know that house belonged to germaine John Grant.

He was a UK citizen.

We organized an operation to arrest Grant.

In his confession, Grant said that Samantha was the big fish.

She was the person who was financing these guys and their operations

she was at the top.

I first heard about Samantha lewthwaite was because the times,

rival newspaper in London, that morning had splashed

with the story that lewthwaite had been linked to this terror cell

with the same materials her ex-husband used...

To detonate the bombs in London in 2005.

What seems to have happened is, at some point

the police moved to arrest germaine Grant outside that house in mombasa.

Now, there was an sms that Grant I believe sent from his phone, to the phone

registered to Samantha lewthwaite that said: "The lions are coming."

Or lions... something like that, right? So that's a warning.

So as the police are there, she's running from the villa.

We had to find all of the places that we suspected these guys were.

In one of the houses was a white lady.

Kenyan police come to that house,

knock on the door, Samantha opens the door.

She opened. She was very calm. She was wearing a Muslim veil.

The kids were playing around the place.

"Can we speak to you?" "Of course you can."

"Can we see your ID?" "No problem."

Natalie Faye webb, "hello, Mrs. Natalie."

That day, we looked at the passport.

It was her photo.

It was not a... a false document.

She told US she was a South African,

by the name Natalie Faye webb.

So we didn't have any reason to doubt that passport.

She went through this perfectly relaxed, yeah.

Gave, got the passport back.

The police said, "we might come and see you again." And left.

That is when we got further intelligence report that...

Natalie Faye webb was a fake name.

Immediately, we sent back another team, back to the house.

Only to discover, she... she's gone.

She's gone, of course.

We discovered some items.

The most interesting one was a UK birth certificate of a lady by the name...

Samantha lewthwaite.

There's another thing that interested US in that house.

We were able to get some documents that gave US the location of another house.

The upmarket, um... Villa that she lived in

is very close to a strip of hotels on a beautiful beach

north of mombasa, called shanzu.

In there, we later discovered sacks of cash...

In a black bin liner...

Ammunition, rifles, and fake passports.

The plot was to hit hotels during the high season at Christmas.

That would have been devastating. We saw what happened in Tunisia.

We saw what happened in paradise hotel in mombasa, nine years earlier.

You can just walk in with a gun and you're gonna cause huge, huge, huge carnage.

Mombasa's... It's a big urban center.

And you have, western tourism,

scuba diving and beachside bikinis,

coexisting with... um, a large Muslim population.

And within that, you have pockets of militancy.

There have been islamist extremist networks in Kenya

since the early 1990s.

Samantha lewthwaite chose to travel to Kenya

rather than to other international hubs of...

Jihadist terrorism, such as Iraq or Syria.

Kenya obviously, being an English-speaking country

may not have posed such a linguistic barrier.

Not needing a visa for entry as well, is also an important consideration.

By June,

six months after she'd fled that house, she walked back into the lion's den.

My name is Peter okono.

I was an eye witness at Jericho bar attack.

The bar, by that time it was very popular.

The civil servants, the police, people working in the government

liked to go to that place because

there was nice food and then there was nice party.

That night I arrived as always. There was a football match and then

there was live music.

So the whole place was full with people.

Then I noticed... a lady.

She was not looking like our ladies around here.

She was more white.

She was in a hijab.

Normally, in these local places...

It looks strange to see a white person.

She was looking determined.

She was focused.

Getting close to her, I managed to see her face.

And realized she had blue eyes.

And before the dust could settle...

...there was a blast.

This is the Mark which was left after the blast.

One person lost his life here.

After that blast, there was a commotion.

People were running helter-skelterly.

Some were... running, to-- to save their lives.

People were bleeding. The people were injured.

There was blood everywhere. On their faces, their hands.

So the ones I knew who died were three.

Was it the person that you saw that night?

Yes.

That's the lady I saw on that particular day.

And two or three people tell you the same.

There's a car park attendant who said it was her.

So I printed four pictures. Three random women,

white women off the Internet. And the lewthwaite picture.

And he picked lewthwaite.

Never seen again. That is the last concrete identification

of Samantha lewthwaite anywhere.

This was a girl

young woman, who had decided that this was her course in life.

Don't forget, as a girl, as a young... much younger woman

she would've been conscious of the edge...

Of danger, of the edge of terrorism.

Her father was involved in it. She lived amidst it.

She was... the product

of a British soldier who was serving in northern Ireland

on a long tour of duty over there.

He met an Irish girl.

The child was brought up over there.

Her father... Served with distinction

with allowances in northern Ireland.

So he was fighting terrorism on a... day-to-day basis.

So... this was a child born of a terrorist situation.

In terror. And eventually turned to terror herself.

At some point, the police found a laptop.

That was a huge coup for intelligence services.

They got a lot out of that.

She's got photos of herself with her kids.

She's on whatsapp, she's on Facebook. She listens to beyonce.

She's all of these things that the person sitting next to you on the bus is.

And she's a jihadi who wants to blow you up when you go on holiday.

The police found, um... A journal, a diary.

And there's a bunch of stuff in there, there was a poem,

"ode to osama."

Thirty-four-line poem she had written

that was, extolling the virtues of osama bin laden.

It was around this time that she was photographed

with this guy, Abdul wahid...

Her husband.

Abdul wahid is a former Kenyan military officer.

He then left the military, allegedly later defected to al-shabaab.

Al-shabaab movement have made allegiances

with al quaeda in 2012.

And since then, has organized attacks...

Car bombings, suicide bombings, land mines,

assassinations.

Because of their brutality, the people fear them very much.

Samantha, she's one of the key al-shabaab, or foreign fighter operatives.

It's important to her.

She's a very important role player.

It's a surprising climb up the ladder.

But it's not unheard of.

We've seen other jihadists, foreign jihadists come to the region

and as they gain symbolic importance, which Samantha did,

then they do actually become more senior and start to exert their own influence.

In her diary, she says that her husband asks

what her children want to be when they grow up.

And her oldest son and her oldest daughter

answer that they want to be mujahideen.

Warriors, fighters.

This is one of the main domestic roles for women

within the jihadist network, and particularly in al-shabaab.

She's raising and encouraging all of her family members to participate

as a family activity, in their dedication to the groups cause.

To have any children with this kind of woman is very important.

Most of the time... her husband dies and then she remarries.

Because one of her roles is to produce the future fighters,

produce future leaders.

Aylesbury's a small market town.

Samantha moved there when she was about 11 years old.

She was born in Ireland. And she went to school and grew up there.

The break up of her parents' marriage...

Affected her.

She didn't really side with her father or mother.

And her best friend was a Muslim.

And she spent all her time with her.

This is where she hung around.

And... she lived down here.

When I saw her as a teenager

she was a normal, usual English flower... child, you know.

Pale skin, light blue eyes.

She had normal friends.

She was a normal child.

The only thing you could say was a change is she...

She reverts to becoming a Muslim.

But that's the whole point.

She's the girl next door. She looks very ordinary in British society.

There's nothing you can just say as: "Here is a monster, here is a demon.

And it's clear because..."

Well, it's not clear.

She's a very ordinary-looking girl. Doesn't make her any less dangerous.

My god.

Well there's a series of shots ringing out now

just outside the shopping center.

Black smoke we can see coming from the top of the building.

We don't know what's going on.

Hello and welcome, I'm Peter Dobby with the BBC world news. Our top stories:

Gunmen opened fire inside a shopping mall in the Kenyan capital.

The red cross says at least 22 are dead.

Dozens more are injured.

The government says it could be dealing with a terror attack.

But has urged people not to speculate.

What happened at the westgate mall was...

A classic al-shabaab attack.

A complex attack using inghimasi, or suicide gunmen.

Four of them approached the westgate mall...

...and entered the mall from two directions:

The upper floor and the main entrance.

One team started throwing grenades.

They both opened fire and then worked their way through the mall...

...killing people that they found inside the structure.

Sixty-one civilians lost their lives in the attack.

Six security officers also made the ultimate sacrifice...

To defeat the criminals.

Intelligence reports

had suggested that a British woman

and two or three American citizens

may have been involved in the attack.

We kind of didn't really understand islamism and islamic terrorism

until 9/11.

We started to become aware?Of these kind of people. They're spouting...

Things... against our country.

But some of them are born in this country.

Why are they behaving like this?

Samantha lewthwaite, very quickly,

she associated with extremist circles. Straight away.

These eight preachers were saying things

which were extremely dangerous.

Don't play games in the globe anymore.

And you, European people, you will pay the most.

If Samantha lewthwaite was looking to do something radical,

something dangerous, something exciting, something lethal...

Well, here we are. It's on a plate.

Just want to bring you some breaking news concerning the shopping mall seige

in Kenya. The Kenyan interior minister says

that they are holding eight suspects.

On our broadcast tonight, wanted.

An international arrest warrant has been issued for the woman who's been called

"the white widow." Question is: "Was she among the attackers at the mall in Kenya?"

And Interpol has just issued a worldwide red notice

trying to track down Samantha lewthwaite.

By the time of the attack on the westgate shopping mall in Nairobi,

it seems her career picked up.

So post-westgate, I don't think it's particularly surprising

that her name has become

so prominent...

Um, and that she is among

one of the most wanted people in the world.

What also adds to her prestige,

notoriety, and infamy is the fact that she's still at large.

Interpol is looking for her.

CIA, mi5, MI6, they're all looking for her.

She's clearly being protected. She's clearly in hiding.

Somalia and Kenya have a long border.

The key is to have contacts

who will guide you to the border and across

without encountering police posts or checkpoints.

As soon as you cross the border, at least in some areas

you're in al-shabaab territory.

If the messages have been passed

she would've been picked up on the other side of the border

and then taken, to a safe area

and probably a safe house within that area

where she would've dropped off the radar.

Somebody like Samantha, who has a huge, international warrant on her

will definitely be taken.

?the reason why I don't like her.

There's nothing to like about a woman who chooses to be destructive.

We're both from the UK, we're both the same age, we're both two women.

Involved in security, though she's insecurity rather than actual security.

So she's touching me on several levels.

As a woman, as a Muslim, as a security officer.

Of course, it... it's irritating, to say the least.

Take the main road. The small streets are blocked.

Okay boss.

Of course, you remain a target.

I've survived two assassination attempts.

There is still a high price on me, but I believe you only live once

and if you're gonna live then make sure that your life means something.

This station here is a very important junction for US

and the principal threat is always an explosion.

We have an al-shabaab terrorism problem here.

So for US we specifically focus on trying to understand

how al-shabaab works.

How they operate, what they do, how they recruit,

and so on and so forth.

Of course, it is very important

to arrest somebody like Samantha.

To extract information from her is also important.

And she's also dangerous. There is also that we are removing a threat.

I don't see Samantha as different from any other mafia boss

to be honest with you.

There's financial interest, there's popularity interest.

There's everything, but religion.

She knows she's wanted.

She's under big surveillance, so she doesn't stay in one place.

She has to move around a lot.

In areas under shabaab control,

al-shabaab is routinely

executing people accused of spying.

So for someone to denounce Samantha...

Pass information about her whereabouts, is very risky.

We have been monitoring her movement and her presence

sometimes at the border between Somalia and Kenya.

Actually there was a time we were almost closing down on her.

She was in jilib.

But, it's not easy to arrest her

because she's in... Al-shabaab controlled territory

we don't have those operational capabilities.

She's out of reach, basically.

We were not able to use, drones against her

because she is a British citizen and it is not...

Legally allowed by the UK law to do this kind of assassination.

With British law, the focus is to get...

The person, not kill the person.

Knowing where she is doesn't mean that she can be reached

by law enforcement or intelligence agencies

without, also taking real risks...

Um, or causing a lot of civilian casualties.

So monitoring her may be the best that the intelligence community could do.

She has dedicated her life to what she is: A terrorist.

And she must be happy with what she's doing.

Um... but she's got no way back. I mean, that is it.

It means she can't travel freely anywhere.

The brits and the international authorities

are not going to let her?Once again disappear for five years and then

pop up on another fake passport.

For somebody like Samantha, she cannot survive in Somalia.

These people have a "sell by" date.

She's obviously developed a trade craft that keeps her safe.

Not talking on the telephone, coded messages passed between individuals.

But I know one thing... She won't survive forever.

She certainly won't.