Interpol issues arrest warrant for 'white widow' eyed in Kenya terrorist attack

PARIS –  Interpol has issued an arrest notice for the British woman known as the “white widow” who is being eyed as one of the key players in a terrorist attack on a Kenyan mall last week that left 72 dead.

The notice, issued at the request of Kenya, said Samantha Lewthwaite is wanted on charges of possessing explosives and conspiracy to commit a felony in Kenya in 2011. 

Authorities believe Lewthwaite, 29, was involved in an alleged plot to attack restaurants and hotels inside the country, according to Reuters. They suspected she had rented several houses in upmarket areas in Mombasa to assemble a bomb.

Lewthwaite was once married to a suicide bomber who killed 52 people in an attack on the London subway system in 2005.

Kenya’s foreign minister has said Lewthwaite took part in the mall siege alongside the Al Qaeda-linked al-Shabab terrorist group.

Law enforcement sources told Fox News this week that they have seen no hard evidence yet to confirm Lewthwaite's participation in the attack, but it has not been ruled out.  

A British security source told Reuters that “it is a possibility” that she was involved.

Lewthwaite is also reportedly believed to have been using the alias ‘Natalie Faye Webb’ to live in South Africa for several years.

She used the identity to take out bank loans and rent property in Johannesburg, the AFP reports, citing local media there.

Credit records released by eNews Channel Africa listed that she lived in Johannesburg’s predominantly South Asian neighborhood of Mayfair for four years, rented at least three properties and ran up debts of $8,600.

Kenyan anti-terrorism police suspected Lewthwaite was working with Musa Hussein Abdi -- who was shot dead with an Al Qaeda boss in Somalia in June 2011 -- in the alleged 2011 Kenya attack plot.

In December 2011, authorities found a woman they believed to be Lewthwaite in Abdi's house but let her go after she showed them a South African passport.

Police later realized the passport was fraudulent and returned to the house, but she was gone.

Lewthwaite originally criticized her late husband — Jermaine Lindsay — for taking part in the London bombing, but later apparently embraced the jihadi cause.

Lewthwaite told The Sun newspaper in September 2005 that her husband had fallen under the influence of radical mosques.

"How these people could have turned him and poisoned his mind is dreadful," the newspaper quoted Lewthwaite as saying. "He was an innocent, naive and simple man. I suppose he must have been an ideal candidate.

"He was so angry when he saw Muslim civilians being killed on the streets of Iraq, Bosnia, Palestine and Israel — and always said it was the innocent who suffered."

She converted to Islam — reportedly while in her teens — and went on to study religion and politics at the School Of Oriental and African Studies in London. It was around that time she met Lindsay, first in an Internet chat room and later at a London demonstration against the war in Iraq.

The coupled married in an Islamic ceremony on Oct. 30, 2002, and moved back to Aylesbury a year later.

Local city councilor Raj Khan, who knew Lewthwaite's relatives in Aylesbury, recalled her as "an average, British, young, ordinary girl."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Security at nation's nuclear facilities vulnerable to terrorist attack, report says

Security at the nation’s nuclear facilities is vulnerable to terrorist attack, a Pentagon-commissioned study reported Thursday.

What’s more, it said potential terrorist theft of enough nuclear material to construct an improvised fission bomb “is a real possibility."

The study by researchers at the University of Texas stands in profound contrast to what the nuclear industry says about its own safeguards.

The Nuclear Energy Institute says that in the aftermath of 9/11, the industry undertook a massive re-assessment of its plant security and bolstered protections. It reports the typical plant features a fenced outer security perimeter, which is heavily patrolled; an inner double fence topped with razor wire, also heavily patrolled; and a third layer of protection surrounding vital equipment.

The containment vessel itself has its own protection with multiple layers of steel and concrete.

One NEI official told Fox News that after 9/11, computer testing was done simulating the direct impact of a Boeing 767 into a containment vessel. The tests found that concrete was broken, but there was no radiation release.

Prof. Alan Kuperman, one of the authors of the University of Texas report, says a study by the U.S. National Laboratory in 1982 produced different results. "It found an impact of an airliner would breach the containment, which could lead to a loss of coolant and therefore a meltdown, and therefore a release of major levels of radiation," he said.

He added that while the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said its reactors could withstand such an impact, the industry lobbied against requiring such standards.

"So on the one hand, the industry says, "Oh, our facilities can withstand an airplane impact," but on the other hand, they say, "no, no no, don't regulate and require us to be able to withstand  that impact," he said.

The new study acknowledged a history of widely divergent research about the likelihood of a terrorist attack on nuclear facilities. 

 One skeptic puts the likelihood that a terrorist group will acquire a nuclear weapon at "very substantially less than one in a million," it said. But another researcher "estimates a 50 percent chance of a nuclear terrorist attack on U.S. soil in the next decade."

The report found tremendous variation in how facilities are protected, and calls for greater uniformity of security at all nuclear facilities, whether power plants, places where nuclear weapons are stored, or where fissile material is stored.

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