A grief counselor, left, comforted Agnes Mutua, who had just identified her nephew, Christopher Chewa, 26, on Wednesday at a mortuary in Nairobi.
By NICHOLAS KULISH, JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and ALAN COWELL
“The next phase really is making sure we know what’s under the rubble,”
said a government spokesman, Manoah Esipisu. “Forensic people need to be
able to clear that rubble and examine the evidence beneath it.”
The investigative work began a day after President Uhuru Kenyatta of
Kenya declared that the four-day siege of the Westgate mall had ended,
saying that the government had finally “ashamed and defeated our
attackers” and that the last militants still holed up inside had been
killed.
Joseph Ole Lenku, the Kenyan interior secretary, said at a news briefing
on Wednesday that the death toll, now at 72, was not expected to rise
significantly, Reuters reported, although the Kenyan Red Cross has said scores of people are still missing in the debris.
The massacre plot was hatched weeks or months ago on Somali soil, by an
“external operations arm” of the Shabab, a militant Islamist group based
there, according to American security officials. A team of
English-speaking foreign fighters was carefully selected, along with the
target: Westgate, a gleaming upscale mall popular with expatriates and
Nairobi’s rising middle class.
The picture that is emerging from the American officials suggests
careful planning: The building’s blueprints were studied, down to the
ventilation ducts. The attack was rehearsed and the team dispatched,
slipping undetected through Kenya’s porous borders, often patrolled by
underpaid — and deeply corrupt — border guards.
A day or two before the attack, powerful belt-fed machine guns were
secretly stashed in a shop in the mall with the help of a colluding
employee, officials say. At least one militant had even packed a change
of clothes so he could slip out with fleeing civilians after the
killings.
“They had people in there, they had stuff inside there,” said an
American security official who asked not to be identified because he was
not authorized to speak publicly. “This was all ready to go when the
shooters walked in.”
Mr. Kenyatta said that intelligence reports had suggested that a British
woman and two or three American citizens were involved, but that he
could not confirm those reports. American officials said they had not
determined the identities of the attackers and were awaiting DNA tests
and footage from the mall’s security cameras. But they said the massacre
had been meticulously planned to draw maximum exposure.
On Wednesday, Kenya began an official three-day period of mourning to
mark one of the most unsettling episodes in its recent history. The
authorities in Kenya, widely perceived as an oasis of peace and
prosperity in a troubled region, are struggling to answer how 10 to 15
Islamist extremists could lay siege to a shopping mall, then hold off
security forces for days.
On multiple occasions, the Kenyan government said the mall was under its
control, only to have fighting burst out again. Earlier on Tuesday, the
Shabab, which has taken responsibility for the attack, bragged in a
Twitter message that its fighters were “still holding their ground.”
Western security officials fear that several fighters slipped out of the
mall during the mayhem of the attack, dropping their guns and
disguising themselves as civilians, an account echoed by some witnesses.
The way the attack was carried out may be related to a rift between Omar
Hammami, a Shabab fighter who grew up in Alabama and became a
phantomlike figure across the Somali deserts, and the group’s emir,
Ahmed Abdi Godane. Mr. Hammami — known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mansoor
al-Amriki, “the American” — was reportedly fatally shot
by another wing of the Shabab less than two weeks ago, although he has
been reported dead before only to resurface alive.
One reason for the rift was Mr. Hammami’s complaints that the Shabab had
become too brutal toward fellow Muslims under Mr. Godane’s leadership.
That brutality, Mr. Hammami said, was the reason the Shabab had become
so unpopular in Somalia and had lost so much territory recently.
Witnesses to the siege in the mall have said the militants urged Muslims
to get out before the shooting started, and Stig Jarle Hansen, a
Norwegian researcher who has published a book on the Shabab, said the
rift might explain why the militants decided to spare Muslims. In the
past, the Shabab have killed countless Muslims in Somalia with suicide
bombs and buried Muslim girls up to their necks in sand and stoned them.
“Even Osama bin Laden criticized Godane for being too harsh,” Mr. Hansen
said. “This attack might have been Godane’s way of saying, ‘See, I’m
not so harsh — to Muslims.' ”
Much speculation has swirled around the question of whether any of the heavily armed militants were women.
Kenyan officials initially asserted that there had been no women among
the attackers, but on Tuesday Mr. Kenyatta seemed to revive the
possibility that one was a British woman.
Several intelligence analysts in Nairobi speculated that she was Samantha Lewthwaite,
a Muslim convert who had been married to one of the four suicide
bombers who struck the London transit system on July 7, 2005, killing 52
people and themselves.
Kenyan authorities suspect that Ms. Lewthwaite had risen up through the
ranks of extremist groups and was leading a terrorism cell on the Kenyan
coast; though they almost swooped in on her in 2011, she escaped. In
Kenya and in Britain, she is now known as “the white widow.”
British authorities confirmed on Wednesday that a British citizen had been detained in Nairobi. The Daily Mail newspaper said
the 35-year-old man, believed to be of Somali origin, was arrested on
Monday trying to board a Turkish Airlines flight to Turkey. His face was
bruised, he was wearing dark glasses and he acted suspiciously, the
newspaper said.
Asked to comment on the report, a Foreign Office spokeswoman, speaking
in return for anonymity under departmental rules, confirmed the arrest
and said the British authorities were offering “standard” consular
assistance.
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