“What was the journey from there to here?” asked Hussain. “I don't think you wake up radical. One is educated, inculcated, pulled into it. This is a small community. One would hope that if anything unusual was going on someone somewhere would have noticed it. No one seems able to paint a picture of what happened. What is her role? What does she do?
“We're at a loss.”
Samantha Louise Lewthwaite was born on May 12, 1983, in the violence-scarred British territory of Northern Ireland, where her father was a British Army soldier and her mother an Irish Catholic — the Ulster equivalent of star-crossed lovers.
Before Lewthwaite reached age 6 the family moved to Aylesbury, where her father worked as a truck driver until the couple's separation.
Raj Khan, a former Aylesbury mayor who knew Lewthwaite and her family, said she forged strong bonds with the city's Muslims, a group that includes many resettled Pakistanis. She converted to Islam as a teenager.
“Living in the neighbourhood, she became very friendly,” said Khan. “She came to enjoy the hospitality of the Muslim community.”