‘White Widow’s’ Irish grandmother hospitalised

The grandmother of the “White Widow” being hunted in connection with the Kenyan shopping centre massacre has been admitted to hospital because of stress.

Elizabeth Allen, from Banbridge, Co Down, was given a panic alarm to contact security services in case the terror suspect, Samantha Lewthwaite — a mother-of-three — made contact.

Family friends say the pressure of the situation and the global notoriety of her granddaughter have taken their toll on the frail pensioner’s health and mental well-being.

Joan Baird, a veteran Ulster Unionist councillor in Banbridge who knows the family, said: “This is so distressing for everyone. Mrs Allen is 85 and she is in and out of hospital. It is just so distressing. Certainly, everybody in the town is shocked and distressed by the news.”

Lewthwaite, 29, is the widow of London suicide bomber Jermaine Lindsay. She is suspected to have been the mastermind behind the weekend attack on Westgate Shopping Centre in which more than 60 people were killed.

Born to English soldier Andy Lewthwaite — who met and married Irish Catholic Christine Allen while serving in Northern Ireland during the 1970s — she enjoyed an unremarkable childhood on Banbridge’s Whyte Acres estate.

Lewthwaite was still at primary school when her family moved to Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. In 1995 her parents split.

After converting to Islam at 17, Samantha changed her name to Sherafiyah and married Lindsay, who detonated the bomb at King’s Cross Tube station, killing 26 people in Jul 2005. The pair had met on an Islamic chatroom. At the time she said she was horrified by the massacre.

In 2009 Lewthwaite disappeared with her children but resurfaced two years later after travelling to Kenya on a false passport.

The Kenyan authorities issued a photograph of a white woman in a veil who they said was wanted for questioning about a bomb factory in the coastal resort of Mombassa. The woman was Lewthwaite.

It is understood she has had little contact with relatives in Northern Ireland since her conversion to Islam.

Lewthwaite is wanted by Kenya over terror plot allegations after she entered the country with a South African passport under the name Natalie Faye Webb.

South African officials were trying to find out if a passport had been found “on the body of the person” killed in the siege.

Lewthwaite, 29, regularly travels to South Africa and stayed in Indian suburbs of Johannesburg earlier this year, according to terror expert and politics professor Hussein Solomon from the University of the Free State.

“She managed to enter the country even though her name is on Interpol’s list of wanted persons,” Solomon told Beeld newspaper.

Lewthwaite was just an average girl who was “empty in confidence”, a councillor who knew her has said.

Councillor Raj Khan, whose family knew Lewthwaite’s family socially in Aylesbury, said he is surprised at speculation she is involved in the attack in Kenya due to how he remembers her.

“She was an average, young, ordinary girl. She had a very great personality. She didn’t have very good confidence,” he said.

Niknam Hussain, current chairman of the independent advisory group at Thames Valley Police, said that to speculate that a housewife from “leafy Buckinghamshire” has been transformed into a “mastermind or kingpin” of terrorism is “just amazing”.