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Standoff at Nairobi mall after gunmen kill at least 59 - Washington Post
NAIROBI — More than 24 hours after Islamist militants stormed an upscale Nairobi mall, a tense standoff continued Sunday between the heavily armed assailants and Kenyan security forces, as the government announced that the death toll had risen to 59 with more than 175 injured in the deadliest attack in Kenya since the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings.
The attackers, strapped with grenades and wielding machine guns and AK-47 rifles, remained holed up inside the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall with as many as 30 hostages, Kenyan government officials said Sunday. An unknown number of people remained inside the building, hiding from the gunmen. Sporadic gunfire erupted at the mall Sunday morning as additional Kenyan security forces arrived to help defuse the crisis, which began Saturday afternoon.
In a statement, Kenya’s Red Cross said that 49 people had been reported missing, citing police figures, but it was unclear whether this number included the hostages. A senior Kenyan Interior Ministry official, Joseph Ole Lenku, said that Kenyan forces had rescued about 1,000 people from the mall and that 10 to 15 attackers remained inside the shopping center.
“The government will go out of its way to make sure we do not lose lives,” Lenku told reporters.
Former Kenyan prime minister Raila Odinga told reporters that he had been told that the precise number of hostages inside the mall was unknown. “There are quite a number of people still being held hostage on the third floor and the basement area where the terrorists are still in charge,” Odinga said, according to the Associated Press.
Al-Shabab, a Somali militia linked to al-Qaeda, asserted responsibility for the assault in numerous tweets using its official Twitter handle, @HSM_Press. The militia said it was retaliating for Kenya sending troops to fight in neighboring Somalia, where it remains a key military actor. “For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now it’s time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land,” the militia said in one tweet.
Early Sunday morning, al-Shabab’s Twitter account was suspended for the third time this year.
The dead and injured included young and old, Kenyans and foreigners, according to witnesses and a U.S. State Department official familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly. No Americans were believed to be among the dead, the official said. Three U.S. citizens were reported injured.
Several children were reported killed or injured.
Annamaria Watrin, an American aid worker from Minnesota, said a friend and his 13-year-old daughter had gone to the mall for a birthday party. “As they went to park their car, she saw five gunmen pop out. They shot her dad. He died,” Watrin said. The girl was injured. Watrin said the girl spent a couple of hours huddled in the car before Kenyan security agents could evacuate her in an ambulance.
The assault was the deadliest terrorist attack in this East Africa nation since al-Qaeda operatives staged twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998, killing more than 200 people in Kenya alone. Al-Shabab has staged numerous smaller attacks in the country since the government sent troops to Somalia in October 2011 to fight the militia. Most of those assaults targeted bus stations and churches, but never areas frequented by Westerners and wealthy Kenyans. The tourism industry is Kenya’s second-largest source of foreign exchange, and dozens of Western aid agencies and businesses are based in the country.
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