Stephen Juma stood in front of the Westgate shopping mall on Tuesday for the first time since the haunting Saturday four months ago when he was directing traffic outside the parking lot. He spoke flatly as he recalled how three gunmen leapt from a car and began shooting, shattering a nation’s sense of security.
Once a magnet for shoppers, diners and moviegoers, Westgate now stands empty behind a corrugated metal fence. One side is covered with scaffolding sheathed in green netting. Much has returned to normal here in Nairobi, Kenya’s vibrant capital, but the mall, once a symbol of the nation’s upward mobility, frequented by the country’s moneyed elite, remains in a kind of limbo.
Inside, the blood has been wiped from the floor tiles, but the telltale bullet holes remain in the thick panes of glass of the store windows that once held mannequins and cellphones and sneakers. The rows and rows of melted goods on the shelves in the Nakumatt grocery store, ravaged by fire, have been hauled away.
The mall remains closed to the public, but Mr. Juma returned on Tuesday as one of the witnesses in the criminal case against four suspects charged as accomplices of the militants who laid siege to the mall that September day. At least 67 men, women and children were killed in the attack, which brought the Kenyan capital to a halt and transfixed the world.
“We have to see the crime scene the witnesses are talking about,” said Chief Magistrate Daniel Ochenja, who is hearing the case. “Now we know what Westgate looks like after the terrorist attack.”
He brought along prosecutors, defense lawyers, witnesses and the accused. The suspects were driven in a green truck. Soldiers in fatigues and green berets guarded the four men, who followed the judge in two pairs, handcuffed together.
The fearsome Somali militant group known as the Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack, but the four men — Adan Mohamed Abidkadir Adan, Mohamed Ahmed Abdi, Liban Abdullah Omar and Hussein Hassan Mustafah — pleaded not guilty last week to charges of supporting a terrorist group.
“They are amused because they are being treated like they destroyed this place, and they’ve never been here before,” said Mbugua Mureithi, a defense lawyer.
Paul Mbunzi, head of security for the mall, was there to answer any questions Chief Magistrate Ochenja might have, pointing to the part of the upper parking lot where a cooking competition for children had turned into a massacre.
“The children were just around there?” Chief Magistrate Ochenja asked, gesturing to where the competition had taken place. Below, in a crater where much of the upper parking lot collapsed, workers still labored to haul away the rubble.
Witnesses like Mr. Juma and Ali Miraj were there to explain to the magistrate just what had happened.
“I was shooting from this pillar, and my colleague was at the other pillar,” said Mr. Miraj, an administrative police officer who was moonlighting for a private security company on the day of the attack.
At first, Mr. Miraj thought the shooting was a robbery. When he saw armed men below him on the ground floor, he waved to them, thinking they were plainclothes police officers. Instead, he said, they turned and fired their AK-47s at him, forcing him to take cover behind the same peach pillar where he recounted the story for the judge.
He said he found himself in a shootout with the militants and wounded one of them in the leg before running out of ammunition and retreating from the shopping mall.
Many Kenyans say they are unconvinced that the militants were killed during the standoff, which lasted days, believing that some or all of them might have escaped in the confusion. An analysis by the New York City Police Department found that there was no evidence that the militants were in the mall after the first night of the siege and that they may have escaped.
The State Department later said that the view of the New York police was not that of the United States government. The F.B.I. said it believed that the attackers had all died at the mall. “We believe, as do the Kenyan authorities, that the four gunmen inside the mall were killed,” said Dennis Brady, the F.B.I. legal attaché in Nairobi, in an interview published on the bureau’s website.
After the attack, security around Nairobi tightened up. Searches at public buildings increased. Perfunctory sweeps with metal-detecting wands turned into methodical scans. For a while, anyway. The heightened vigilance has worn off.
Even as Kenyans have fallen back into their old habits, smaller-scale attacks have continued to threaten the public. In December, an explosion ripped apart a passenger van, killing four and wounding at least 25. On Jan. 2, a grenade attack wounded more than 10 people at a nightclub popular with tourists in Diani, a coastal resort.
Just last week, an explosion shook Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi. Kenya’s inspector general of police, David Kimaiyo, played down the episode, saying in a message on Twitter that “papers caught fire after a loose light bulb fell into a dustbin,” but witnesses described a strong blast. The United States Embassy included the episode in a warning to American citizens in Kenya among “several recent small Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and grenade attacks.”
But those attacks did not capture public attention like the one at Westgate. Prosecutors say the four men they have put on trial were part of the support network that made the Westgate siege possible. “The four are directly connected to the individuals who physically carried out the attack,” Mr. Brady said.
Field trips aside, the trial is taking place at the Milimani Law Courts, an imposing yellow building inaugurated in 2011 by the president at the time, Mwai Kibaki.
“If my son is Al Shabab, then the whole of Kenya is Al Shabab,” Waraka Hussein Mohamed, 45, the mother of one of the suspects, Mr. Abdi, said on a recent afternoon, proclaiming her son’s innocence. “Instead of the government going to Somalia to arrest Al Shabab, they arrest our children,” she added. “They were just targeting places where Quran was taught.”
A committee responsible for figuring out how to reopen the Westgate mall began holding public hearings this week. The group’s task, according to Kariuki Muigua, joint secretary of the committee, is also to build the public’s confidence “with regard to security.”
Store owners testified about the challenges they faced after outlets were destroyed, stock was stolen and insurance companies informed them that they were not covered for terrorism. If they could overcome the financial hurdles to reopening, they would want more armed guards.
Without security, witnesses testified, there could be no investment. “There’s always that question lingering: When is the next Westgate taking place?” said Eric Raikanya, store operations manager for the shoe company Bata, which had a branch at Westgate.
But many expressed a desire to return as an act of defiance. “My people are ready to go back,” said Terry Mungai of Ashleys Salon. “Even clients, the ones who were inside there for several hours, are ready to go back.”
“The terrorists came and left. They don’t live there,” she said. “They can hit anywhere else.”
No comments:
Post a Comment