Nationalities of Kenya shopping mall gunmen unknown

By Sudarsan Raghavan and Greg Miller,

NAIROBI —Kenyan security forces on Monday seized control of a luxury shopping mall that had been attacked by Islamist militants, but officials said some assailants remained hidden inside stores in the mall and little was known about who staged the brazen attack and what countries they came from.

A total of 62 people were killed after the gunmen, from the Islamist al-Shabab militia, burst into the Westgate Premier Shopping mall at lunchtime Saturday and began shooting, said Joseph Ole Lenku, a senior official with the Interior Ministry.

The Kenyan Red Cross earlier estimated the death toll at 69, but on Monday revised the toll to 62, saying some bodies had been double-counted, the Associated Press reported. Sixty-three people remain missing, according to the Kenyan Red Cross, and 175 people were injured.

Loud explosions and sporadic bursts of gunfire could be heard coming from the mall at midday, and large plumes of smoke rose from the area.

Lenku told reporters that “almost all of the hostages have been evacuated,” and the Interior Ministry said that three of the estimated 10 to 15 militants were killed in the standoff. Ten members of the security forces were injured. The smoke billowing from the mall, Lenku added, was caused by the militants, who set fire to the Nakumatt supermarket as a tactical diversion “to distract our activities.”

“Our resolve to defend our country has never been higher,” Lenku said. “We will take the war to the criminals’ doorstep.”

Gen Julius Karangi, the chief of the Kenyan Defense Forces, said the jihadists inside the mall are “clearly a multi-national collection from all over the world” — though he did not offer details. Added Karangi: “We are fighting global terrorism here.”

But the nationalities of the attackers remained unknown. A Twitter posting on Sunday that was purportedly from al-Shabab described several of the attackers as Americans, but the militant group said Monday — in a different tweet — that it had not sent the earlier message and had not released the names or any other details about the individuals involved in the attack.

The later tweet was verified by the SITE Monitoring Service, which tracks statements by extremist groups.

A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said officials were checking the initial report, that Americans were among the attackers, but had not been able to confirm it.

The well-organized assault on a place that is considered an oasis of luxury for Western expatriates and Nairobi’s wealthier residents stunned Kenya, which has one of the continent’s biggest economies and has been a major hub for U.S. military and humanitarian activity in East Africa. It offered sobering proof of the resiliency of one of Africa’s most brutal insurgent groups.

The attack began around lunchtime Saturday. It seemed certain to impact Kenya’s all-important tourism industry and spread unease among the numerous Western aid agencies based in Nairobi.

The dead included numerous foreigners from Britain, France, Canada, Australia and other countries. While no Americans were reported killed, Ruhila Adatia-Sood, the wife of Ketan Sood, a Foreign Service national working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Nairobi, was among the dead, USAID said in a statement. Five American citizens were wounded, U.S. officials said.

In a nationally televised news conference on Sunday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said that one of his nephews had been inside the mall and was killed in the attack, along with his fiancee.

In numerous tweets from a Twitter handle that was later disabled, al-Shabab declared that the attack was carried out in revenge for Kenya sending troops to fight in neighboring Somalia and said that the group was shifting the battleground to Kenya.

At Nairobi’s Aga Khan University Hospital on Sunday, survivors spoke about how they escaped death in the mall. One British man said his wife and children were hiding behind a meat counter in a store with other women and children. The gunmen sprayed bullets at them, killing a woman and a teenage girl, and wounding his wife, said the man, who asked that neither his nor his spouse’s name be used because they feared retribution. His wife lay in a hospital bed and declined to speak.

The gunmen, the man said, released the children who were still alive and informed his injured wife that she, too, could leave if she converted to Islam, making her recite the Shahada, Islam’s basic profession of belief.

Then the gunmen handed chocolates to the children as they left the mall, the man said.

In a nearby bed, Aquilah Kauser Ishaq, 32, a marketing manager for a local radio station, was nursing wounds from a grenade attack. She was on the top floor when she and her friends heard explosions. Outside in the parking lot, kids were taking part in a cooking class when the gunmen began firing randomly in their direction. “They actually targeted the kids,” Ishaq said. “There was a brother and sister running away. They were shot dead in front of us.”

Then a grenade landed by her foot. A friend pushed her out of the way, but the shrapnel struck her legs and back. The grenade struck a boy and she watched him die, she said. “I even wonder how I am here now,” she said.

The assault was the deadliest in Kenya since al-Qaeda operatives masterminded the twin bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998.

Al-Shabab also staged the twin bombings in Kampala, Uganda, during the soccer World Cup in July 2010, killing more than 70 people. That attack, the militia said, was in retaliation for Uganda sending its troops to Somalia to support its Western-backed government.

But since mid-2011, al-Shabab has been on its heels, after an offensive by African Union forces backed by the United States and other Western governments. While it remains in control of large swaths of southern Somalia’s countryside, the militia has been riven by a struggle within its core leadership.

In Kenya, the militia has staged small attacks on local targets such as bus stations and churches, killing a handful of people, since the government sent troops to Somalia in October 2011. But Saturday’s attack suggested far greater operational planning and tactical sophistication, analysts said.

“The attack is more likely to be a first salvo of a reinvigorated al-Shabab than the last gasp of a defeated organization,” said J. Peter Pham, head of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council. “While there have been divisions within and defections from al-Shabab, my sense is that the hard-core element will actually emerge more nimble and lethal as a result of shedding those elements.”

The attack on the mall, he said, would have required a local unit to conduct reconnaissance and plan other details, suggesting that the militia has an “extensive support network” in Kenya.

Targeting the mall, Pham said, sends a “much clearer signal of the group’s resurgence, both to al-Qaeda central and other regional affiliates and to audiences from which it will now, undoubtedly, try to recruit.”

Abdi Aynte, a Somali analyst, said al-Shabab wants to “shift the front lines of the war from inside Somalia to the heart of Kenya” and trigger a public debate about the “viability” of Kenya’s intervention in Somalia.

Not all terrorism experts agreed that the attack showed al-Shabab’s strength. Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a blog that the attack was “the act of a declining political movement that has lost enormous ground in recent years” and is “on its way to oblivion.”

Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at Georgetown University, said a reemergence of al-Shabab could place new strain on U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism agencies, which have shifted resources to places such as Syria, Egypt and Mali.

“Renewed al-Qaeda-generated instability in East Africa is the last thing we need right now,” Hoffman said. “We can keep hoping that the war on terrorism and the struggle against al-Qaeda is over, but it isn’t. It’s the monster that keeps rising from the grave.”

Miller reported from Washington. Craig Whitlock, Anne Gearan, Ernesto Londoño, Julie Tate and Debbi Wilgoren in Washington contributed to this report.