'White widow’s' SA plot revealed

250913: LEWTHWAITE

250913: LEWTHWAITE

Published Feb 26, 2015

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Johannesburg - South Africa’s State Security Agency (SSA) and foreign intelligence services foiled planned suicide bomb attacks by al-Qaeda in South Africa between 2007 and 2010, including one against a Jewish centre in Cape Town, according to secret SSA reports.

The documents, which were leaked to the Al Jazeera television network and published on its website on Wednesday, link the planned attacks, one of which would have involved at least five suicide bombers, to the so-called “white widow” Samantha Lewthwaite.

Lewthwaite, also known as Natalie Faye Webb, is a British citizen believed to have been involved in attacks by the Somali Islamist extremist group al-Shabaab in Kenya. She lived in South Africa between 2009 and 2011 under a false South African identity.

The leaked SSA reports reveal that an al-Qaeda financier arrested between April and May 2011 had described how an agent had been tasked by Harun Fazul, a senior al-Qaeda leader, to travel to the United Arab Emirates to obtain finances for the operation that would be carried out by the five suicide bombers.

This operation which had been planned since 2007 would cost up to $1 million. The reports do not make clear what the target of the operation was, although elsewhere they refer to a planned attack on a Jewish centre in Cape Town.

Although the reports don’t refer to this, in 2009 all US embassy buildings in South Africa were shut down for several days because of a security scare. Intelligence sources said then that they feared an attack by al-Shabaab which had been proposed in intercepted cellphone calls between al-Shabaab operatives in Somalia and Somali expatriates in South Africa.

Among the secret cables released this week is one which contains a request from Britain’s MI6 secret service to the SSA to provide it with information about the ownership of several South African cellphones which had been called from a Somali cellphone used by an individual whom it named – but which is deleted from the cable on the Al Jazeera site. This individual, it said, was involved in al-Qaeda and associated with activists running an insurgency in Mogadishu in 2007 and 2008.

The cables said Harun Fazul was holding a SAPS identity card and a South African passport when he was killed in 2011.

Independent Foreign Service

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