Samantha Lewthwaite: Quiet girl who now tops list of terrorism suspects

Samantha Lewthwaite was a shy 11-year-old schoolgirl growing up in the Home Counties when she first developed a crush on a Muslim boy. The boy, who was several years older, was apparently uninterested and so nothing came of it, but the brief summer holiday infatuation in Buckinghamshire perhaps foreshadowed her conversion to Islam, marriage to a suicide bomber and eventual emergence as one of the world's most wanted terrorism suspects.

Lewthwaite, now 29, was at first portrayed as another victim of the July 7 London bombings when her 19-year-old husband, Germaine Lindsay, killed himself and 26 passengers on a Tube train near King's Cross station in 2005.

However, seven years later she was dramatically identified as a suspected member of a terrorist cell that planned to attack the Kenyan port city of Mombasa. Her alleged involvement earned her the nickname the "White Widow", a play on the practice of referring to female suicide bombers as "black widows". She has since been linked to other plots in East Africa, culminating in reports that she was involved in - and perhaps even led - the al-Qaeda-linked assault on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi. Lewthwaite's former friends in the Buckinghamshire market town of Aylesbury, where she grew up, expressed shock and disbelief on Tuesday that the quiet, "nice girl" they knew as a child could have carried out such a massacre.

Her father, an English soldier called Andy Lewthwaite, met her mother, an Irish Catholic called Christine Allen, while he was serving in Northern Ireland during the Seventies. Lewthwaite was born in Banbridge in County Down, Northern Ireland, in 1983 and the family moved to Aylesbury when she was young. She was remembered as a bright and popular pupil at Elmhurst primary school and The Grange secondary school, although after her parents split up in the early Nineties she became more withdrawn and started confiding in a local Muslim family.

One childhood friend said Lewthwaite spent a couple of summers when she was 11 and 12 "hanging out" with a mixed group of Muslim and white children at Alfred Rose Memorial Park in Aylesbury. The Muslim man, who did not want to be named, said: "She had a little bit of a crush on my mate, who was three or four years older than her - it's normal at that age. My mate wasn't interested. I can't say she had extreme views about anything, and she wasn't Muslim at that time."

Although born a Christian, Lewthwaite became more and more interested in Islam. She converted aged 15 and changed her name to Sherafiyah. In a sign of how seriously she took her new religion, she began wearing the hijab face veil and full-length robes, covering every part of her body apart from her eyes. A classmate from primary school, who asked to remain anonymous, said he often saw her shopping in Tesco in a hijab with a couple of other white women who had also converted to Islam.

"She was a quiet, calm and normal girl. Nobody ever had any problems with her," he said. Lewthwaite enrolled in a degree course in politics and the study of religions at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2002, although she dropped out before completing it. She first made contact with Lindsay, also known by his Islamic name, Jamal, in an internet chat room and they met face-to-face at a Stop The War march in London. They married in October 2002, moved to Aylesbury in September 2003, and had a son in April 2004. Lewthwaite was heavily pregnant with their second child when her husband blew himself up.

She said at the time: "I totally condemn and am horrified by the atrocities. I never predicted or imagined that he was involved in such horrific activities. He was a loving husband and father." Another former schoolmate of Lewthwaite said he was not altogether surprised when Lindsay became a terrorist but could not believe that she would have followed him. He said: "When Jamal first came to the town, I used to do a lot of training with him - he used to do a lot of boxing. He wasn't right in the head. He always had a violent streak to him. "But she was all right. She was just a normal girl, I never really thought there was anything unusual about her. I can't believe she could be involved in this." Lewthwaite and her children were forced to go into hiding after the July 7 attacks when their home was firebombed. She lost touch with her family and is believed to have moved to the Midlands, where she remarried a Muslim of Moroccan origin.

In 2009 she returned to Aylesbury to give birth to her third child, but did not make contact with her family. That same year she disappeared with her three children and only resurfaced in 2011 after travelling to Kenya on a false passport. Her parents in Aylesbury were too upset yesterday to speak about how their daughter had come to be linked to the atrocity in Nairobi.

Lewthwaite's frail 85-year-old grandmother, Elizabeth Allen, who still lives in Banbridge, has been given a panic alarm to alert the security services in case her granddaughter contacts her. Family friends said the pressure had taken its toll on Allen's health, and the shock of the latest claims caused her to be taken to hospital.