<<Print>>

Information gathered by Daily Guide indicates that on September 21, 2013, between 9:00am and 11:30am, the Al-Shabab militant group is believed to have driven three vehicles into the parking lot of the Westgate Shopping Mall, and remained in the vehicle for a while, raising the suspicion of one of the mall�s security guards. The guard alerted his supervisor, who called the Parklands Police Station close to the mall. But his gestures might have attracted the attention of the attackers who immediately opened fire on him and others nearby. This coincided with the time Prof. Awoonor and his son�s chartered taxi made its way into the parking lot of the mall. Afetsi Awoonor�s account of the incident to Daily Guide apparently coincided with this phase of the attack. According to Daily Nation, Kenya�s biggest selling newspaper, armed policemen at the mall and banks nearby joined the fray and returned fire, while they called for reinforcement from the Kenyan Defence Force (KDF), and before the KDF moved in, the small team of policemen had secured most parts of the shopping mall. However, the team of policemen were said to have pulled out apparently because its commander was shot in a �friendly fire� by the KDF unit that responded to the call for reinforcement. �The pullout left a vacuum that apparently allowed the terrorists to regroup and move through the mall slaughtering many captives,� the Daily Nation stated in its last Friday edition. �It also allowed the terrorists to deploy heavy calibre machine guns that they had not used in the earlier shootout.� Blow By Blow Account Unfolding developments indicated that the radical Somali Islamist group, Al-Shabab, which shot and killed Prof. Kofi Awoonor, Ghana�s former Chairman of the Council of State and 67 others, had planned their globally condemned Westgate Shopping Mall attack in Kenya several months ago. Some security operatives spoke anonymously to DAILY GUIDE in Nairobi, Kenya, saying that they had reasons to believe that the Al-Shabab terrorists actually rented a small corner shop within the prestigious Westgate Shopping Mall and used it as a conduit to sneak in and store several sophisticated weapons over time for their planned attack on Saturday September 21, 2013, dismissing perceptions that the attack was a �snatch and grab� operation. Incidentally, similar information was leaked to some other international media outlets that had set up mini bureaus close to the Westgate Massacre scene in Nairobi. Last Friday, CNN confirmed this in its news broadcast. �To anyone shopping at Nairobi�s Westgate Mall, it would likely have seemed just another store. But according to a Kenyan intelligence official, the small shop concealed an ominous secret. It was rented by the Al-Shabab terrorists, or their associates, who within a year would carry out an attack on the upscale shopping mall� � that was how the CNN�s Michael Pearson and Nima Elbagir reported the issue. �The information � revealed Friday to CNN by the source, who is close to the investigation into the attack � suggests the Somali terror organization had been planning the operation at least that long.� In Nairobi, news of the meticulous planning and reconnaissance of the terrorists at the Westgate Shopping Mall had spread rapidly, forcing the Kenyan Interior Ministry to quickly wade in with a rebuttal. Kenyan Interior Secretary, Joseph Ole Lenku was quoted to have said the rumour was still unconfirmed. �As to whether they had a shop in the mall is something we cannot say categorically,� Lenku said. Daily Guide gathered that the manner in which the attackers spirited the sophisticated weapons into the mall was a major subject of investigation for experts from Germany, Britain, the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Interpol and the Israeli intelligence, among others. However, Kenyan newspapers reported that the Kenyan National Intelligence Service boss, Michael Gichangi passed intelligence to some Kenyan security chiefs and the country�s CID director, Ndegwa Muhoro. Tight-lipped Kenyan officials were particularly not forthcoming in volunteering information to the media. Attempts by Daily Guide to gather further information from the Ghanaian Embassy in Kenya similarly yielded no dividends, as the High Commissioner, H.E. Kingsley Saka Abdul Karimu, was unavailable. Apparently he had accompanied the family of Prof. Awoonor to convey his corpse from Kenya to Ghana. Since the September 21 shopping mall siege in Nairobi, several local and international media organizations including DAILY GUIDE, the BBC, Associated Press (AP), French News Agency (AFP), and a channel of China Central Television (CCTV) had set up semi-permanent desks about 200 meters from the crime scene to hound information from Kenyan and international forensic investigators sifting through evidence at �ground zero� of Westgate Shopping Mall in a bid to track down the nerve centre of the Al-Shabab group that launched the gruesome massacre on unsuspecting shoppers. Prof. Awoonor, his driver and his son Afetsi Awoonor, were among the first victims to be shot that day. Afetsi Awoonor escaped with gunshot wounds on his shoulder, but his dad did not make it, as he died on the spot. Their driver, according to latest reports, survived. Devastating Massacre According to the Red Cross data, 39 people were still unaccounted for. Red Cross officials at the scene of the devastating massacre said their most challenging task was how to tackle the increased public anxiety about the alleged missing persons. Some worried family and friends of the missing persons were unsure if they were alive or dead. Sixty-eight persons died and approximately 240 others sustained various degrees of injury, while about 1000 more shoppers were evacuated. Most of those evacuated were either held hostage by the terrorists or hidden in obscure places such as bank vaults. DAILY GUIDE gathered that the terrorists might have reluctantly killed the women and children caught in the crossfire. Some survivors recounted how some of the terrorists holding them hostage said they did not plan to kill women and children, but were forced to do so because coalition forces occupying Somalia had also killed their women and children. The terrorist group that stormed the Westgate Mall was believed to have entered Kenya from Somalia, determined to avenge the alleged deaths of colleagues, women and children at the hands of the Eastern African Military Forces fighting against Al-Shabab in Somalia.