'I will have to tell children their father was 7/7 bomber,' widow
The young widow of a 7 July suicide bomber told Friday how she "totally abhorred" her husband's deadly actions. Samantha Lewthwaite described in an interview with the popular newspaper The Sun how Jermaine Lindsay tenderly kissed their young son goodbye before leaving on his lethal mission. She said she believed his mind had been poisoned by visits to radical mosques in London, Luton, southern England, and northern England. Lindsay, 19, blew himself up on a Piccadilly Line train between King's Cross and Russell Square stations in the worst of the suicide attacks on London on July 7, killing himself and 26 others.
He was one of four bombers who carried out attacks on the British capital that day. But his 21-year-old widow, who gave birth to the couple's second child after the atrocities, told the paper she believed her partner could not have left without saying farewell to their toddler, Abdullah. She told The Sun she believes she heard him on the stairs of their home in Buckinghamshire, near London, "I feel sure he couldn't have gone through with it without seeing him one last time. He kissed our child goodbye and then crept off to blow up King's Cross. In the morning I found he'd left the keys on a table downstairs. He obviously had no more use for them."
The couple, both converts to Islam, met over the internet and married in 2002 when, she said, he had been a "peaceful man who loved people." But Lindsay, who used the Muslim name Jamal, changed after they moved from Huddersfield, northern England, to Aylesbury, outside London, and took to disappearing for days on end, visiting mosques around the country. She had assumed he was at a mosque that fateful Thursday, but said when police interviewed her and showed her close-circuit TV footage of her husband, her "world collapsed." She gave birth to their daughter, Ruqayyah, this month.
One day, she said, she would have to tell their children what he had done "Jamal is accountable for his actions 100 percent and I condemn with all my heart what he has done. I will try to remember for my children's sake the Jamal I loved and raise them knowing their father was a man who truly loved them. But the day will come when I'll have to tell them what he did," she concluded.
Posted by: Fred 2005-09-24 |