Kenyan authorities on Thursday deported a British terror suspect and associate of the notorious “White Widow” to the UK.
Police and immigration officials said this was after he completed a prison sentence.
Jermaine Grant was jailed for possessing bomb-making materials and forgery.
He forged his Canadian passport.
He is linked to the notorious White Widow Samantha Lewthwaite who is missing.
The hunt on the woman is ongoing.
Grant was flown back to Britain on Thursday August 8 accompanied by Kenyan security and immediately arrested after touching down at Heathrow Airport.
He left aboard a Kenya Airways flight accompanied by police, officials said.
A Mombasa had last year ordered Grant to be deported once his prison sentence had elapsed following a case made by prosecutors for him to be sent away.
Grant has links to the White Widow, the wife of 7/7 terrorist bomber Germaine Lindsay, and al-Shabaab.
Grant was arrested in 2011 after they found bomb-making materials in his flat in Mombasa.
He was then prosecuted and sentenced to four years in prison in 2019, to be served alongside a separate nine-year sentence for forgery.
Prosecutors then lodged a case to have him deported to Britain once he had served his sentence.
British police said a man who was wanted on recall to prison in relation to breaching licence conditions linked to a previous conviction was arrested at Heathrow Airport as he arrived back into the UK on a flight from Kenya.
The man’s licence conditions were revoked in August 2005 following the initial breach, the officials added.
“Upon his return to the UK on 8 August, the man was also arrested for being unlawfully at large and arrested on suspicion of being a member of proscribed organisation al-Shabaab. He remains in police custody.”
Grant was arrested in a flat in Mombasa in December 2011.
Police believed he had been planning a bombing campaign against hotels popular with foreign tourists.
He had previously been apprehended in 2008 over a plot to attack a police base on a bus trying to enter Somalia while dressed in a burka.
Investigators found chemicals, switches and a manual on explosives in the apartment, which he is believed to have shared with Lewthwaite, known as the White Widow.
He was also carrying a forged Canadian passport.
When police swooped on Grant’s apartment, Lewthwaite had fled, escaping just minutes earlier after Grant allegedly warned her with a text message.
It read: ‘The lions are inside. One of them is very watchful, like a bird watches a stone.’
He is thought to have become radicalised as a teenager in the same British prison where ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid first turned to Islam.
Reid is serving a life sentence in the US for plotting to blow up a transatlantic flight.
Investigators also believe he had links with al-Shabaab, of which Lewthwaite – originally from County Down in Northern Ireland – is also believed to be a member.
Lewthwaite remains at large as one of the world’s most wanted people and has not been seen since – though security sources believe she fled Somalia after leaving her fourth husband two years ago.
She is suspected of orchestrating a string of terror attacks in Africa that have killed more than 400 people including the deadly 2013 shopping mall attack at the Westgate in Nairobi that killed more than 60 civilians and several soldiers.
She remains on Interpol’s red notice list – the de facto ‘most wanted’ list of international terrorists and criminals.
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