By Rebecca Evans
The British accomplice of fugitive ‘white widow’ Samantha Lewthwaite was carrying a bomb-making manual when police arrested him.
Muslim convert Jermaine Grant was picked up by Kenyan anti-terror officers just hours before Lewthwaite, 28, fled when their suspected joint bomb plot to blow up Western tourist targets in Mombasa was foiled.
Police believe soldier’s daughter Lewthwaite – the wife of 7/7 suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay - was the main financier and bomb-making tutor for East African cell Al Shabaab, which was just days away from carrying out a deadly terror attack on hotels and a shopping centre in the Indian Ocean resort.
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Jermaine Grant, pictured in court in Mombasa, and Samantha Lewthwaite, widow of 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay, face charges of planning to murder 'innocent civilians' and possessing bomb-making equipment
She disappeared with her three young children in the immediate aftermath of Grant’s arrest and is now being hunted by Kenyan police, Scotland Yard and the CIA.
Both Lewthwaite and Grant face the same charges of planning to murder ‘innocent civilians’ and possessing bomb-making equipment.
As Grant’s terror trial continued yesterday, the court heard that he was picked up by police wearing a computer memory stick on a chain around his neck - just yards from a bomb-factory that he and Lewthwaite were linked to.
Senior anti-terror police sources revealed that the memory stick contained the terrorist manual The Black Book Companion: State-of-the-art Improvised Munitions – a step-by-step beginners’ guide on how to make homemade bombs.
Samantha Lewthwaite pictured with her husband, 7/7 bomber Germaine Lindsay, who blew up a Piccadilly Line train on 7/7
Two hours after his arrest, Grant, from Newham, East London, gave Lewthwaite’s name to police and told them that she was also involved in their alleged scheme.
Officers went to arrest her but she was let go in mysterious circumstances amid allegations of corruption.
At the same time, they raided one of the four properties rented by Lewthwaite and discovered a haul of bomb-making chemicals, wires and electrical switches.
In a packed Mombasa courtroom yesterday, Grant, 29, sat smirking in the dock as the full extent of his and Lewthwaite’s suspected terror plot was revealed when the chemicals were presented one by one to the judge.
These included acetone, hydrogen peroxide, ammonium and lead nitrate - the same materials listed in the manual and used by her suicide bomber husband Germaine Lindsay when he blew up a Piccadilly Line tube train travelling between King's Cross St Pancras and Russell Square in 2005, killing 26 people.
Anti-terror officer Sgt Peter Muli was one of the officers who arrested Grant and fellow terror suspect Fouad Abubakar Manswab.
He told Judge Joyce Gandani: ‘I was sent to Mombasa from Nairobi to arrest some terror suspects who we believe to have been planning to attack. We believed they were in the latter stages of the plan.’
Germaine Lindsay, 7/7 bomber and husband of wanted terror suspect Samantha Lewthwaite, centre, pictured with fellow bombers Shehzad Tanweer, left, and Mohammed Sidique Khan, right, at Luton train station
The trial, which began in May, was adjourned until December, when six officers from Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command are expected to fly to Kenya to testify against Grant.
The 29-year-old is already serving a two-year sentence for being in Kenya illegally.
Lewthwaite, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, is thought to have initially fled to lawless Somalia but she has recently been linked to a spate of recent grenade attacks in Mombasa, including one on a nightclub which killed three, including a young boy.
She was seven months’ pregnant when Lindsay detonated his homemade bomb in 2005.
VIDEO: Jermaine Grant in the dock as the first prosecution witness takes the stand...
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