Mall attackers escaped, say US police

Only four men carried out the attack on Westgate Mall and they may all have escaped, says a report by the New York police.

The report issued on Tuesday by the New York Police Department (NYPD) seems to contradict the account by Kenyan authorities.

Kenyan officials had earlier said that about 15 people carried out the attack.

The report released to private security personnel in New York on Tuesday says all the four terrorists may have slipped out of the mall 12 hours after the start of the attack.

“It is unknown if the terrorists were killed or escaped the mall,” the report says. “A major contributing factor to this uncertainty was the failure to maintain a secure perimeter around the mall.”

Contrary to Kenyan officials’ statements during and following the attack, the New York police report says the terrorists did not hold hostages inside the mall, nor did they create a smokescreen by setting fire to mattresses.

Contacted yesterday, Inspector-General David Kimaiyo said: “In regard to the number of terrorist, that’s nothing new. Our investigations revealed that they were four and we reported that to Parliament some time back. But I need to go through their report before I can make any other comment.”

Security video recovered after the onslaught indicates that the shooters were not “interested in taking any hostages,” according to the NYPD account. “They only appeared interested in killing a broad spectrum of people.”

The killers used AK-47 rifles

After exploding three grenades upon entering the mall, the killers used AK-47 rifles in single-fire mode to shoot their victims, according to the findings of an NYPD team sent to Nairobi as part of a US anti-terrorism task force that investigated the attack.

The report credits private security guards at the mall with helping many people reach safety.

But it depicts a chaotic response on the part of Kenyan authorities.

Security officers were slow to arrive at the scene, with the first tactical team reaching the mall about 90 minutes after the start of the attack at about 12.15pm on September 21, the report says.

The Kenyan tactical team did not actually enter the mall until 3pm, the NYPD adds.

The report states the first set of police officers inside Westgate did not have official markings, and were fired on by Kenyan soldiers. The officers also lacked basic equipment such as bulletproof vests, radios and handguns, the NYPD found.

Kenyan emergency responders “had no idea what the mall looked like internally,” and did not know how to access the mall’s closed-circuit television system, the assessment adds.

The attackers disabled or tilted some of the system’s cameras to conceal their whereabouts.

But footage seen by the NYPD investigators shows four gunmen gathered in a supermarket storage room where they apparently remained for six hours, praying and tending to one of their number who had been shot in the leg.