Kenyan soldiers clear the top floor balcony and interior of the Westgate mall in Nairobi on Tuesday. PHOTO| AFP
Posted Thursday, September 26 2013 at 00:00
In Summary
In Nairobi, Kenyan troops and rescue workers
scoured the wreckage of the shattered mall yesterday for bodies and
booby-trapped explosives.
Washington. The Somalia-based militants who
stormed a Kenyan mall had a detailed plan and had hidden weapons at the
scene beforehand, according to US officials cited by the New York Times
yesterday.
According to the report, a hand-picked group of
English-speaking fighters from the Shabaab, an Islamist rebel group, had
trained for the assault in Somalia for weeks beforehand.
On Saturday the group burst into the upscale
Westgate mall in Nairobi armed with grenades and assault rifles and set
about killing staff and shoppers.
The gang took hostages and held off police and
troops until Tuesday, when President Uhuru Kenyatta declared the battle
over and said that at least 67 people were dead.
An investigation is continuing, but according to
the “US security officials” quoted in the Times’ report, the assault had
been meticulously planned in Somalia.
The group had blueprints of the mall and had
hidden powerful belt-fed machine guns in one of the stores beforehand,
perhaps with the help of a corrupt local employee.
Some of the militants appear to have brought a
change of clothes so they could swap out of their military-style
fatigues, drop their guns and escape hidden among fleeing civilians.
Spy agencies are awaiting results of DNA tests on
slain and captured attackers to confirm if any were recruited from the
United States, Britain and other places beyond Somalia.
Witnesses cited by the Times said that at least
two of the attackers were women, amid reports that the gang could have
been led by British extremist Samantha Lewthwaite.
Lewthwaite -- known as the “White Widow” -- is a
Muslim convert and a widow of one of the suicide bombers who struck in
London in July 2005.
In Nairobi, Kenyan troops and rescue workers
scoured the wreckage of the shattered mall yesterday for bodies and
booby-trapped explosives.
Rescuers wore face masks and some soldiers wrapped
scarves around their mouths because of an overpowering stench inside
the Westgate centre, once the capital’s most upmarket mall. A large part
of the complex has collapsed after heavy explosions and a fierce fire.
SOURCE:THE CITIZEN
Across Kenya, flags flew at half mast at the start of three days of official mourning.
Somalia’s Al-Qaeda-linked Shabaab rebels claimed
on Twitter that 137 hostages they had seized all died, figures
impossible to verify and higher than the number of people officially
registered as missing. They also accused Kenyan troops of using
“chemical agents” to end the standoff.
Top forensic experts and investigators from
Israel, the US and Britain are supporting Kenyan teams, officials said,
with many questions remaining over the identity of the attackers, the
possible presence of a British woman and American jihadists, and how the
cell got such large quantities of weapons and ammunition into the
complex.
An AFP reporter outside the bullet-riddled mall
saw teams of sniffer dogs, which will check for explosives and victims
buried under the rubble of a collapsed part of the building. One rescue
worker said he saw “many bodies” inside.
“The army told us we would get access to the
bodies yesterday, but then said it was too dangerous for us to go in
because of booby traps and because of the part that caved in. We have to
get access today,” a Kenyan Red Cross official told AFP. “The bodies
that are still inside the mall will have to be identified from photos.
They are now in such a state of decomposition that you can’t put a
family member through that,” the official said.
In one of the worst attacks in Kenya’s history,
the militants marched into the four-storey, part Israeli-owned mall at
midday Saturday, spraying shoppers with automatic weapons fire and
tossing grenades. The attack, which intelligence experts said they had
no specific prior warning of, was well planned and prepared, with
fighters stocked with enough ammunition to hold off Kenyan forces backed
by American, British and Israeli agents.
Close to 200 were wounded in the siege, which saw
running battles between militants and security forces in one of
Nairobi’s largest and most modern shopping centres. The mall is popular
with wealthy Kenyans, diplomats, UN workers and other expatriates, and
was packed when the attack began.
The siege developed into a hostage drama with
Shabaab claiming civilians were being held, and Kenyan special forces
described the final stand-off as delicate -- with gunman running and
hiding in supermarket aisles, store rooms, a cinema and casino and
placing booby traps. (AFP)
SOURCE:THE CITIZEN
