Four Corners: Sept 1

Next Monday Four Corners screens a film from Hardcash Productions: The White Widow – the story of the woman dubbed the White Widow, now one of the world’s most wanted terror suspects.

Her name is Samantha Lewthwaite. Better known as the ‘White Widow’, she is now seen by authorities as the most wanted female terror suspect in the world.

Last year, when Islamist gunmen attacked a shopping centre in Kenya’s capital Nairobi, it was alleged she had been one of the masterminds. This has never been confirmed but it didn’t stop police in Kenya issuing a warrant for her arrest or Interpol announcing a red notice against her for possession of explosives and membership of the al-Shabaab terror group.

But who is Samantha Lewthwaite? And how did she metamorphose from a young middle class English woman to a jihadist, sworn to kill those she sees as the enemies of Islam.

This week, reporter Adam Wishart tells her story, trying to understand the people and the forces that shaped her life.

He begins his search in Aylesbury, a town in one of Britain’s Home Counties. It was here she spent her formative years. From the available evidence, she had a very normal childhood until she came under the influence of radical preacher Sheik El Faisal. In the 2002 she met Jermaine (Jamal) Lindsay and to many they seemed a happy young Muslim couple.

All that changed on 7th July 2005, when Jermaine climbed aboard a London train and blew himself up, killing himself and 26 passengers.

Initially Lewthwaite denied she had known anything about the plan. This claim began to unravel when, in the wake of her husband’s death, she told friends she was searching for a new husband who was intent on jihad.

Having left Britain, over the past six years she has criss-crossed Africa, leaving behind a trail of evidence that suggests she lives with a known terrorist and that she has almost certainly been involved in the planning of terror attacks.

Asked why he thought she had embraced radical Islam so profoundly, reporter Adam Wishart rejects the idea she had been simply influenced by British-based clerics who have brainwashed her. Instead, he explains it this way:

“She is in this extreme place now. [But] if you follow every step she took, they almost all make sense. If I think about my own life, if I had altered the trajectory of each decision I’d made over 20 years, then I too would be in a very different place. The one step she made that doesn’t make sense was when she began to believe that violence is the right course.”

Samantha Lewthwaite is certainly in a different place. English born, she now occupies an influential position in one of the most violent terrorist groups in the world. She may not be firing the guns but she is almost certainly playing a vital role in the delivery of immense cruelty and death.

Monday 1st September at 8.30pm on ABC.