Nairobi: Thirty people are confirmed to have been killed in an attack by heavily-armed gunmen on Nairobi's upmarket Westgate shopping mall, a senior police official said. "The death toll is now standing at 30, this includes those who have died at the scene and at the hospital," the official told reporters. Kenyan police and soldiers have isolated and pinned down the remaining gunmen who attacked the mall in the country's capital, a security source said.
Gunmen stormed the shopping mall killing at least 30 people including children and sending scores fleeing in panic, the attack claimed by the Somali Islamist group al Shabaab. Shooting continued hours after the initial assault as troops surrounded the Westgate mall and police and soldiers combed the building, hunting the attackers shop by shop. A police officer inside the building said the gunmen were barricaded inside a Nakumatt supermarket, one of Kenya's biggest chains.
Senior police sources said they believed a well-organised "terror gang" of about 10 people was behind the assault on the shopping centre, which is popular with wealthy Kenyans and expatriates and was packed with around 1,000 shoppers when it was besieged at midday. An eyewitness said that he heard the gunmen speaking Arabic or Somali and saw the group executing shoppers, in what appeared to be the worst attack in Nairobi since an al-Qaida bombing at the US embassy killed more than 200 in 1998.
al Shabaab, which is battling Kenyan and other African peacekeepers in Somalia, had repeatedly threatened attacks on Kenyan soil if Nairobi does not pull its troops out of the Horn of Africa country. "The Kenyan govt (government) is pleading with our Mujahideen (holy warriors) inside the mall for negotiations," the group said on its official Twitter handle @HSM_Press. "There will be no negotiations whatsoever at #Westgate." Another al-Shabaab tweet read: "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 Kenyan government, which has troops battling Islamist Shabaab insurgents in neighbouring Somalia, said it was still too early to say who was responsible. "Investigations have begun to find out the perpetrators of this crime. I urge Kenyans not to speculate," interior minister Joseph Ole Lenku said in a statement.
