When Rina Attias phoned to say that she was trapped with terrorists inside Nairobi’s Westgate mall, her husband Albert replied with a short instruction: Hang up right now.
Kenya has begun a forensic investigation into the weekend attack on a Nairobi shopping mall with the help of the United States, Israel, Britain and others, the interior minister told a news briefing on Wednesday.
As Kenya began three days of mourning on Wednesday for at least 67 people killed in the siege of a Nairobi mall, it was unclear how many more hostages may have died with the Somali Islamist attackers buried in the rubble.
Powerful explosions sent thick smoke billowing from the Nairobi mall where militants from Somalia’s al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab group threatened to kill hostages on the third day of a raid in which at least 59 have already died.
Kenyan security forces launched a “major” assault late Sunday on the upscale Nairobi mall where an unknown number of hostages are being held by al-Qaida-linked militants, in an operation officials said would end the two-day standoff that had already killed 68 people. Within a few hours, a military spokesman said most of the hostages had been freed.
Journalist Tom Kirkwood, who witnessed the Nairobi mall this weekend, tells his powerful story and how the attack targeted ‘ordinary Nairobians.’
On Monday, Lavie Tidhar wrote about Jewish vampires and Hebrew punks. His new novel, “An Occupation of Angels,” is now available. His blog posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog series. For more information on the series, please visit: