Kenya foreign minister Amina Mohamed added: ‘The Briton was a woman... who has done this many times before.'
Yesterday, a Twitter account belonging to terror group Al Shabaab also claimed that Lewthwaite had ‘commanded' the attack.
A post said: ‘We have received permission to disclose the involvement of Samantha Lewthwaite aka sherafiyah [her Islamic name], she successfully overseered [sic] the mission.'
Lewthwaite's grandmother, 85-year-old Ellen Allen, was rushed to hospital in Banbridge, Northern Ireland after collapsing from the stress of her granddaughter's notoriety.
Lewthwaite, from Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, has been on the run since police foiled her bomb plot targeting Western hotels and a shopping mall in the Kenyan coastal resort of Mombasa in December 2011.
Yesterday, the trial for her British accomplice in this plot, Jermaine Grant, began in Mombasa.
Lewthwaite was seven months pregnant when her husband blew himself up, killing 26 people.
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