Kenyans are still in shock that, Violet Kemunto Omwoyo the Alshabab Bride, could have been the brains behind last week’s deadly terror at 14 Riverside Mall.
Kemunto, who is still missing is believed to have been the wife Ali Salim Gichunge, the lead soldier. But there are credible reports that the gorgeous woman who holds a Degree in Communication and Public Relations was the mastermind of the whole operation.
Kemunto is not the first woman to terrorize Kenya:
Female jihadis, such as Ms Kemunto, with her beauty and level of education, serve as potent recruiting magnets for Islamist groups, said Mr Musamali, a former General Service Unit officer.
There are a number of local examples of this. In March 2015, four young women from relatively well-off families — Ummulkheir Sadri Abdalla, Khadija Abubakar Abdulkarim, Halima Aden and Maryam Said Aboud — were arrested in Elwak on allegations that they were sneaking into Somalia to join the al-Shabaab.
They were arraigned before a Mombasa magistrate’s court with 20 charges including being al-Shabaab members, collecting and holding information on terrorism and organising terror trainings, among others.
The State prosecutor based his evidence on the videos found on the suspects’ mobile phones, which he claimed to be showing terror-related activities.
But many were surprised to learn that Ummulkhayr was a third year medicine student in Sudan while Khadija was studying pharmacy at Mount Kenya University (Thika Campus).
Ummulkhayr was born in 1996 and had been studying at the International University of Africa in Khartoum since 2013, according to the police.
According to government records, Maryam was born on December 4, 1990 in Shela Malindi, and studied at Burhani Secondary School in Malindi until 2005 then joined Kenyatta University (Mombasa campus) in 2009.
She died in May last year while their case was ongoing. Her three alleged accomplices were set free four months later, in October last year.
Before them, a mother of four with a comely face from the United Kingdom, Samantha Lewthwaite, also famously known as the “white widow”, had captured world imagination after she joined al-Shabaab.
The other high-profile local female terror suspect is Haniya Sagar, the wife of slain Muslim cleric Aboud Rogo, a fiery preacher who used his sermons at Masjid Musa in Mombasa to openly urge Muslim youths to take up the cause of global jihad up until he was shot by unknown people in August 2012.
His wife was arrested and charged in 2016 with aiding terror activities and failing to give information which would have stopped the commission of a terror attack.
She was jailed for 10 years in February 2018 but was set free on appeal in October.
Ms Sagar, and three others, had also been charged with aiding three women — Tasni Farah, Ramla Hussein, and Maimuna Abdirahman — to carry out an attack at the Central Police Station, Mombasa, in September 2016.
The three women, who walked into the station pretending to report a stolen phone, brandished knives after they were barred from accessing the cells with one throwing a petrol bomb in an attempt to burn down the station.
The women had apparently gone to rescue a terror suspect, a former Recce squad officer, who had been held at the station.