British woman wanted by Kenya reportedly penned ode to Bin Laden

By Robyn Dixon

Oct. 23, 2013 12:56 PM PT

<i>This post has been corrected. See the note below for details.</i>

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa -- The trouble with writing poetry, as terrorism suspect Samantha Lewthwaite found when she penned an ode to Osama bin Laden after his death, is finding elegant rhymes.

Martyred, for example, can be reasonably rhymed with “started.” But kuffar, the favorite word for non-Muslims among Islamist militants, posed more of a problem for Lewthwaite, nicknamed the White Widow in the British and Kenyan media and viewed by many as the world’s most wanted woman.

Toward the end of the 34-line poem that Sky News reports she wrote about Bin Laden, Lewthwaite appeared to give up trying to find rhymes for words such as paradise, killed, Koran, almighty and planners. But she took one last stab at a rhyme in the last two lines of her poem, juxtaposing Osama and Obama.

Lewthwaite’s ode to Bin Laden was found on her laptop computer, according to Sky News. The computer was seized by Kenyan police at her apartment in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa after she narrowly evaded police arrest in 2011. The police see her as a key figure in a terrorist network in Kenya that planned numerous bomb attacks.

[For the record, 12:42 p.m. Oct. 23: A previous version of this post incorrectly stated that Lewthwaite evaded arrest in December 2012. It was in 2011.]

She is believed to be closely associated with figures from the Shabab, the Somali militant group that claimed responsibility for last month’s shopping mall terrorist attack in Nairobi.

Lewthwaite is the daughter of a British soldier and the widow of Jermaine Lindsay, one of the suicide bombers who attacked the London transportation system in 2005, killing 52 people.

Lewthwaite publicly distanced herself from that attack, saying she abhorred violence. But several years later, she disappeared. She spent time in South Africa and later resurfaced in Kenya.

When she wasn’t writing poetry or tweeting, Lewthwaite spent hours surfing dieting and fitness websites, according to a police analysis of her laptop, Sky News reported. She downloaded thousands of documents, mostly about diet, body image and fitness.

One makeover site had details on how to create a Taylor Swift hairdo.

Lewthwaite has become a source of fascination for Britain’s tabloid media, which have run portraits of her as a demure teenager in a school uniform, interviews with former neighbors who described a shy, introverted girl, and extracts from a notebook also found in her Mombasa apartment, in which she reportedly said she wanted her children to become jihadists and martyrs.

Lewthwaite’s Ode to Osama, just as she reportedly penned, follows:

Oh sheik osama my father, my brother

My love for you is like no other

Oh Sheik Osama now that you are gone

The muslims must wake up they must be strong

I know that you are in a better place

That Allah has bestowed upon you grace.

Us we are left to continue what you started.

To seek the victory until we are martyred.

To instill terror into kuffar.

Until the world is governed by la illaha illala.

Oh sheik osama no this for true