Narrow Escapes and Questions in Kenya Attack
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NICHOLAS KULISH
Pretending to be Muslim, hiding in a box and using the blood of a
shooting victim were among the ways that potential victims escaped death
inside a shopping mall.
After Massacre, a Struggle to Understand
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Family and friends at the
grave of Ruth Njeri Macharia, 28, who was fatally shot at a mall in
Nairobi. Her supervisor on Friday described how he had escaped death. More Photos »
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and NICHOLAS KULISH
Published: September 27, 2013
NAIROBI, Kenya — One man showed the militants his voting card, very
gingerly placing his thumb over his first name and pretending he was
Muslim.
Multimedia
Another man writhed on the floor of a supermarket, with four gunshots in
his leg, and watched the gunmen mercilessly hunt down the wounded and
then take a soda break.
Yet another survivor slathered herself in the fresh blood of a boy dying next to her and played dead.
Less than a week after more than 60 people were killed by Islamist
militants inside a Nairobi shopping mall, survivors shared crushing and
astonishing accounts on Friday of how they kept their wits about them
and narrowly escaped death.
“I heard them yell out, ‘Muslims, get out of here!’ ” recalled Joshua
Hakim, a clerk on his way to buy some Heinekens when 10 to 15 Islamist
militants stormed into the Westgate mall last Saturday and starting
shooting men, women and children. “I got the courage to stand up and
pull out my voting card, and I held it in such a way only Hakim showed.”
Mr. Hakim is not Muslim. He is a born-again Christian, he said. But his
last name saved his life. The Islamist militants, who are believed to be
connected to the Shabab militant group from Somalia, spared the lives
of some Muslims. When the militants — armed with “big guns, huge guns, I
don’t know what kind of guns those were,” Mr. Hakim said — saw his last
name, which is often an Arabic name, they grunted and let him pass.
“Maybe someone in my family long ago was Muslim,” Mr. Hakim said. “I don’t even know.”
Fred Bosire, a butcher at the mall’s supermarket, said he was in
agonizing pain, with four gunshot wounds to his leg, when the militants
announced that anyone who was wounded could stand up and leave.
He did not buy it.
“I knew they were bad people,” Mr. Bosire said. The militants then executed two wounded women who called out for help.
A few minutes later, Mr. Bosire said, the militants reached into a soda
cooler and he heard the hiss of escaping gas as they opened a couple of
cans of soda.
“It was a sad day,” he said. “I don’t even want to remember it.”
Sneha Kothari Mashru, a Kenyan radio broadcaster, said she was hiding
behind a car when the militants shot a teenage boy huddling next to her.
As his breathing slowed, his phone kept ringing, and when Ms. Mashru
reached over to turn it off, her hands got covered in blood. That gave
her the idea of smearing the boy’s blood all over her arms, to fool the
killers into thinking that she was dead, too.
“It was horrible,” Ms. Mashru said.
On Friday, the debate intensified over exactly what had happened inside the mall and the security services’ response.
“Blame game over Westgate attack,” read the front page of The Daily Nation newspaper, which reported that the commander of a special police unit had been wounded by friendly fire during the standoff.
A former government official said in an interview Friday night that the
army and police units rushing into the mall had exchanged fire,
resulting in fatalities. A police spokeswoman vehemently denied that.
“There is no officer who was killed by another officer,” said Zipporah
Mboroki, the spokeswoman. “We were working in harmony.”
Another vexing question is why three floors of the mall’s parking deck
collapsed during the final stages of the military assault on the last
assailants.
According to the former Kenyan government official, who said he had been
briefed on the matter, the collapse was caused by overzealous Kenyan
soldiers who fired rocket-propelled grenades inside the mall to dislodge
the remaining militants, who had held out for more than three days with
belt-fed machine guns. Kenyan officials have not commented, but more
eyes are turning to a possible row between the police and the army, with
some Western officials saying police officers had exercised more
restraint in the early hours of the rescue effort.
Western security officials in Nairobi said several civilians trapped in
the mall were killed after police officers withdrew from the mall and
the Kenyan military staged an assault against the militants. It is not
clear whether any civilians were still alive in the mall when the
parking deck later collapsed, setting off an avalanche of bricks.
For every narrow escape, there were other tragic turns.
Mary Muriithi, who picked up the body of her nephew from the mortuary on
Friday, said that he was supposed to drive a visiting foreigner to the
upscale Village Market shopping center. At the last minute, the
foreigner changed his mind and asked the nephew, Christopher Chewa, 26,
to go to Westgate instead. Mr. Chewa, who had an infant daughter and a
pregnant wife, was shot and killed at the mall.
“These are innocent people,” said Ms. Muriithi, her voice colored by both grief and disbelief.
John Makau, a supervisor at the Urban Gourmet Burger restaurant at
Westgate, heard an explosion and thought it was a propane tank blowing
up. Then he heard gunfire. He dashed to the Nakumatt grocery store,
where he hid in a box.
Mr. Makau was rescued, but he shared this story in the Langata cemetery,
where the sun beat down fiercely on the grave of his co-worker, Ruth
Njeri Macharia, 28. She was shot and killed during the attack.
On Friday, workers smoothed the concrete covering her grave, topped with
a black cross bearing her name, her birthday, and the date Sept. 21,
2013.
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