Film captures Westgate horror just days ahead of anniversary

ATLANTA

The gory details of the massacre that happened at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi a year ago were brought back to life in living rooms across America when a documentary on the attack on the shopping centre premiered on US Home Box Office (HBO) television channel on Monday night.

By Tuesday, the documentary was available on YouTube and was being shared on social media.

Terror at the Mall by British filmmaker Dan Reed offers a “real time” glimpse of the bloodletting witnessed in the shopping complex during the terrorist attack in which at least 67 people were killed and many others injured.

Those interviewed included Kiambu businessman Andrew Munyua, who had stopped by the mall to run errands and buy packed lunch. He was at the entrance when the attackers struck.

“I was being searched and my hands were up,” he narrates. “I realised that the guard who was searching me had fallen down.”

Then all hell broke loose. There was a loud blast, followed by gunfire. The documentary goes on to record the mayhem that was to last four days.

Kenyan security agencies appear to score poorly in the film, which features never-seen-before footage of the attack.

The commentator describes Kenyan soldiers and police officers as “confused and lacking a comprehensive plan”.

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According to the documentary, security officers did not arrive at the scene for almost an hour after the attack started and did not enter the mall for another two hours.

When they finally got in, they mistakenly fired at one another, leaving one policeman dead and others injured, according to the narrator.

CCTV camera footage used in the documentary shows both the police and KDF soldiers leaving the mall 90 minutes later as the terrorists continue to cause mayhem.

A shopper narrates how victims who had fled to the rooftop lay bleeding as they waited for help that never came.

“We lay there for a very long time,” Jasmine Postwalla, who was trapped on the upper level, says in an interview.

“You would expect to see a lot of armed soldiers and all coming up the ramp. Maybe that was what we were expecting, but that didn’t happen.”

Reed assembled thousands of hours of footage gleaned from more than 100 security cameras inside the mall. He also used video footage from television crews, cellphones and still photographs.

On Monday, Americans and other HBO subscribers watched as he interviewed 82 survivors and their rescuers. The hour-long film shows four ruthless terrorists armed with AK-47s and grenades on a shooting spree, killing anyone in sight.

They stalk their victims from a gourmet burger restaurant to the vegetable aisle of a grocery store at the back. Tracer bullets are seen as they slash across blurry closed-circuit footage.

The film is not for the faint at heart as it shows blood oozing from the dead and dying, blood stained floors where only moments earlier children had been playing. And in the interviews, relatives recount in horrific detail the deaths of their loved ones.

However, the documentary also celebrates the heroism displayed by civilians and plain clothes police officers. They are seen courageously storming the mall to helped rescue scores of people trapped inside.

“I was not thinking that I could die, that I could get shot, I felt invincible,” says police officer Nura Ali in the film.