Terror at the Mall This World

This programme contains some strong language and scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.

In September 2013,

Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group from Somalia,

attacked a shopping mall in neighbouring Kenya.

More than 100 security cameras recorded the attack,

which left 71 people dead.

They couldn't be bothered whether they were shooting at

an 80-year-old woman or an eight-year-old kid.

The bullets, they're shining. I knew I was shot.

Pieced together from thousands of hours

of silent security-camera footage,

this is the story of the men, women and children

who came face to face with the terrorists at Westgate mall.

You're just lying there, waiting to see when it's going to be you,

when it's going to be your turn.

I put my arms over my son and I put my leg over my daughter,

then the footsteps got closer and closer

and then the shooting began.

Westgate was one place where you meet people of different cultures,

different tribes, different religions, different everything.

I mean, just...I think that was the most special thing.

At the front of the mall, overlooking the street,

were three busy restaurants.

Urban Burger, Tapas and Artcaffe.

It was the best mall in Nairobi.

It was very upmarket.

It's the place where prominent people come.

At the back of the mall was Nakumatt,

a giant supermarket on two floors.

Nakumatt Westgate was the premier supermarket in Nairobi.

It had an escalator.

That was a huge thing for Kenya, you know,

to have an escalator inside a supermarket.

It sold everything that you might need.

That was their tag line, "All under one roof."

We'd be there two, three times during the week.

It was more than just a mall to buy, you know, extra stuff,

it was really a part of our lives.

That Saturday was really a normal Saturday, like any other Saturday.

I went with my kids. My daughter Amelie, who's six years old

and my son Elliott, who's four.

I was quite excited because I was doing a big shop

and I don't go to Nakumatt very often.

I try to shop in the local supermarket.

But I was finding stuff you don't normally find.

I'm French. I found Orangina, which is a drink you get in France

and I remember getting really excited about it.

We were planning on getting as many groceries as we could.

We needed to do it relatively quickly

because I had a little baby who was eight months old

and he was heading close to naptime,

so it was kind of that shop where we took our time, but we were thinking,

"OK, baby's going to lose it soon, he needs to get home."

Opposite Nakumatt's entrance,

Valentine Kadzo had set up a display table for a computer company.

I was at Westgate because I was working.

We had a display table.

We have the products so that the customer can touch and feel.

A few feet from Valentine's display table,

Katherine Walton stopped to make a phone call.

The kids just wanted to hang out a bit and have some lunch.

I have two boys. A 14-year-old and a 10-year-old

and then three little girls, four, two and then 13 months.

Katherine's two sons were shopping in Nakumatt supermarket.

We stopped at the drink aisle because I wanted something to drink.

So I tried calling my mum for a few minutes and then I gave up

and then we went and stood in line.

We were there for quite a while.

We'd probably already been in Nakumatt for an hour or so.

The trolley was full, we were almost finished.

And then I remembered I wanted to get a bottle of wine,

so I actually left the kids by the shopping trolley,

which, in Kenya, you kind of do because you don't have that culture

of fear of your kids getting kidnapped or things like that,

so you know that they're quite safe.

At 12:30, Andrew Munyua was at the street entrance to the mall.

I thought of just passing through Westgate, do a few errands,

buy some packed lunch

and then later on, pick my boy and come back home.

You have to go through security check.

And I was at the door, where I was being searched,

and my hands was raised up.

I was just walking in front of Nakumatt

when there was a loud explosion.

Bang!

I realised the guard that was searching me had now fallen down.

A grenade went off, immediately followed by gunfire.

You could see people falling on the floor.

Some were diving for cover, but some were actually falling.

When I dived down, I decided to touch my chest.

And I checked down and I saw there was blood on my fingers.

Niall Saville and his wife Moon Hee

had been having lunch on the terrace at Urban Burger.

I realised that my wife wasn't actually behind me.

I saw her crawling on the ground, clearly in a lot of pain.

Her legs looked very bloodied.

I took her arm and dragged her

towards the back wall of the burger restaurant

so that we didn't have a direct line onto the road.

Assuming that it was a hit-and-run grenade attack

and therefore, being out of sight of the road

was the important thing at that point.

Tracer rounds. They were tracer rounds.

There was that flash of light as they were flying through the air.

People were confused. They don't know where to go.

Stepping on each other.

That's when I saw a white lady with three children.

So they were running in different directions.

That's when I picked one.

You know, I started to run and then a Kenyan woman came

and grabbed one of the girls from me.

And we dove behind this computer display table that was there.

She had Portia, my four-year-old,

and was laying on top of her to protect her.

Now, Diljeet Kaur and a friend

also squeezed in under the display table.

My friend was lying like that

and that Kenyan lady was lying like that.

It was a tight fit with the seven of us.

We were kind of laying on top of each other and all scrunched up.

As the gunfire got closer,

people surged from the main mall into the supermarket.

As we were running, people just came and started pushing me and Blaise

and, like, I had to reach my arm through just to grab his hand

so I wouldn't be separated from him.

People were running towards the back of Nakumatt.

And that's when I thought, "I've got to get to the kids."

Because it was quite chaotic, I couldn't remember which till,

so it took me a while to sort of find them.

And I remember screaming, you know, "Amelie, Amelie!"

to try and pinpoint where they were.

GUNFIRE

Inside Nakumatt, a customer's mobile phone

recorded the gunfire getting closer.

As two gunmen moved from the street

to the restaurants by the front entrance of the mall.

I was looking at his face. He was young.

He looked at me and he fired.

As I pulled my wife behind one of the counters

and as I kind of collapsed on the floor,

I realised that I'd been shot.

100 feet away at Dormans cafe,

15-year-old Nuriana Merali and her little brother

had been waiting for their mother.

With them was a school friend, Makena Kinyua.

We were trying to stay as low as we could

because we knew there were people shooting from the main entrance.

I could see people running into Nakumatt, so we ran inside Nakumatt.

There was a lull as the gunmen reloaded their weapons.

Waiter Mike Kagwe saw Andrew wounded and went to him.

So I think at that moment, somebody came and pulled me from the Dormans.

I had to tell him, "Come, come, come. Stand up. Let's run!"

Mike rushed Andrew into Nakumatt towards the loading bays,

where hundreds of shoppers were trying to escape.

The gunmen now moved from the restaurants

towards Nakumatt supermarket.

We were all laying as flat as we could behind that table.

In the beginning, I cried. I was just so scared.

And the Kenyan lady, you know, kind of tapped me on the shoulder

and said, "You can't do that. You have to be strong for your girls."

The white lady told the little girl I was holding,

"Put your fingers in your ear and lay down and keep quiet."

Two policemen guarding a bank on the first floor

spotted the terrorists and opened fire.

I was using my rounds to cover myself, shooting so rapidly

so that I could deny him a chance to shoot at me.

I shot him at his right leg, almost around his knee there.

He was limping, so I knew that the guy was injured.

Undeterred, the terrorists headed on towards Nakumatt

and the display table where the four women

and three children were hiding.

Petra kept crying.

She would really scream when the shooting would start.

She would just scream and scream.

I had brought one bottle of milk with me

and I gave that to her and she drank it and went to sleep.

I realised that I would definitely, as being an American,

as being a Christian,

that it was...much more dangerous, probably, for me.

You know, I was a prime target.

As the first two gunmen entered Nakumatt,

two more were making for the mall's upper entrance.

WOMAN: That's right, it's all happening today

at the rooftop of Westgate...

They headed towards the rooftop,

where a children's cooking competition was taking place.

What are you making today?

We're making apple pudding and... with cream cheese delight

and we're making crunchy tofu salad.

We heard gunshots, we heard screaming.

I personally felt that this is a robbery or something

and these are thugs.

They need a passage so you stay out of the way

and everything will be OK.

It was almost like we were being herded like sheep.

So we went to the furthest corner of the parking lot on the roof,

away from the door and the ramp,

and there were a lot of people stuck in there,

lots of...lots of women and children from the cooking competition.

Cooking competition, yeah.

Then suddenly we just saw people falling one after the other.

As they shot, you could hear the sound of the bullet

thud into someone.

The sound of the bullet going into flesh

is like nothing you've ever heard.

Doof. It feels like somebody's being thumped, you know,

and then they just drop.

I looked at them when his gun was pointing at me

and he shot me in the thigh.

Then I realised that I was shot in the stomach as well.

I just put up my hand and I said, "Please let the children go.

"Just let the children go."

The only thing he said was that, "We're here to kill."

"You killed our people in Somalia.

"We normally don't kill women and children

"but you killed ours in Somalia so we're here to take revenge."

I started saying the shahada really loudly,

"La 'ilaha 'illa-llah, muhammadun rasulu-llah,"

which is, "There's no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger."

So as soon as he heard that

the gunman looked at me and he said, "Are you a Muslim?"

And I said, "Yes, I am." By that time my wife had come next to me.

She was drenched in blood from top to toe.

He said, "Is this your woman?"

and I said, "Yes, she is,"

and then he said, "Go."

As Aleem and his wife ran down the ramp to safety, the gunmen

also released other Muslims who'd survived the initial attack.

An elderly lady stood up, encouraged to see that the gunman was

releasing people, so she said, you know, "Oh, I'm old,

"I can't kneel any more, my knees are arthritic,

"I'm in a lot of pain, please let me go."

And the man asked her, "Are you a Muslim?"

And while the woman was thinking of the answer to give,

the gunman just shot her.

The gunfire on the rooftop panicked shoppers trying to escape

through the loading bays down below.

Lots of people came running out of the storeroom,

back into Nakumatt supermarket, screaming, "Don't go that way!

"They're shooting that way."

So then we were really stuck, we knew we couldn't get out the front

and we thought we couldn't get out the back.

The gunmen in Nakumatt made an announcement

on the supermarket's public address system.

"This - Al-Shabaab attack, and we're going to kill everybody!

"You came to our land,

"you killed our women and children, it's our time."

Where do you hide in a supermarket?

Anywhere you are, you're exposed.

And I kept on thinking, why now?

I can't believe this is happening while I have my baby with me.

I thought the best place to hide would be, you know,

behind the meat section, behind the deli counters, if you like.

Nuriana and Makena also hid behind the meat counter.

Nuriana's mum was lying in front of me

and then next to her was Nuriana

and then behind Nuriana was her younger brother.

Everybody was just lying down, face down,

and trying to move as little as possible.

I said, "Can I come and hide back here?

And they said, "Sure, just..." and they showed me where to come in,

so I kind of ducked down, I'm still holding my eight-month-old baby.

The security camera footage from the meat counter was never recovered.

But cameras nearby show the areas to the left...

and right.

The occasional phone would ring and everybody would be like, "Shhh!

"Turn it off, put it on silent."

Sometimes I would look up to...and the other mothers would look at me

and we'd sort of nod to each other, kind of encouraging nods

to say, look, it's going to be OK.

Bleeding from a shrapnel wound,

Andrew had taken refuge in Nakumatt's furniture storeroom.

I'm starting to feel dizzy, I'm starting to feel nervous.

I'm now starting to think this could be

the end of ourselves, you know.

I don't know whether we'll be out of the mall. I'm bleeding.

And I'm starting to fear now,

and I was thinking, like, this is the end of the story now.

They ushered me into a room where they administered first aid.

That's when he told me that he's thirsty,

he wants water, and I told him that, just stay put,

wait for me, let me go look for water, I bring it to you.

As Mike went downstairs to fetch water for Andrew,

the power went out.

That's when one of them saw me and shot me.

I was screaming and something in me told me, like,

"Shut up or they might be coming looking for you."

So I kept quiet. And I started running.

The minute he got to us he collapsed, he fell down.

To be honest, I've watched enough movies to know what to do.

When someone is shot and bleeding you have to apply pressure,

at least to stop the bleeding.

I was a little bit scared that he might succumb to his wounds,

but I didn't let that, you know, distract me from doing my best.

To me, I feel like...telling him thank you, it's not enough,

because he really saved my life.

As the lights came back on, the first pair of gunmen

headed for the meat counter, where 20 people were hiding.

I told the lady that someone was coming,

cos I could see the reflection of someone coming.

She was shaking and saying, "They're coming, they're coming,"

and I was like, "Shh, shh," thinking they were just going to walk past.

But they came and they came straight into where we were.

And then very deliberately they just shot everybody around us.

I never looked up, I never saw anything, it was just

the sound of "doof-doof, doof-doof".

They said, "Now it is your turn, we have come for you."

You know, as they were shooting, children were screaming.

Yeah, as they were shooting.

I just felt some pressure, though, I didn't really feel any pain.

It's now when the person walked away I just looked

and I could see I'd been shot.

There was a really strange physical force, and I found out later

that I was shot in my left leg.

It entered in my left leg and came out by my right hip.

My main concern at that point was to make sure my kids didn't see anything

so just to try and get them to keep their faces down,

so I was holding their faces down, saying, "Don't look up, don't look up."

There was just a lot of blood

and a lot of anguish in people's faces, as they lay there dying.

200 feet away, Katherine and her three daughters

were still hiding under the display table.

I was worried that my girls, you know, if they were to get shot,

you know, that I would have to lay there and to watch them die,

or if I were to be shot that they would have to lay there

and watch me die, and I didn't want them to have to go through that.

Where I was lying I could see there was this guy

at the doorway of Nakumatt.

And I asked him, "What's going on?"

And he told me, "(Lie down.)" That's what he told me.

Because from there, where he was, he could see the other direction,

where I could not see.

The second pair of gunmen had come down from the rooftop.

They shot anyone they found.

He was peeping, peeping.

Why did he think of hiding under the elephant?

Anyone could see you.

Whenever I see that elephant, for the rest of my life...

I'll always remember that guy.

Inside Nakumatt, all four gunmen regrouped.

They had murdered several dozen people so far.

Outside the mall there was still no sign of a rescue operation.

It was 45 minutes since the attack had begun.

I got a call off a friend and told me, "Don't go to Westgate,

"it's some robbery and there's lots of dead people."

So I grab a camera and drive down.

Veteran war photographer Goran Tomasevic of Reuters news agency

shot rapid bursts of pictures as he moved past the terrorists' car

and found the victims of the first few minutes of the attack.

Music coming out of one of the bars.

It was very weird, you know, seeing dead people

and some funny music coming out.

The kind of music what you can hear in elevators, you know.

A handful of police had arrived

but the sound of heavy gunfire had kept them out of the mall.

Amber lay behind the meat counter with her children,

bleeding from a bullet through the pelvis.

It felt endless. It felt like no-one was coming for us and I was going to die there.

And I was going to die there on top of my children, and what would happen to them?

The little boy next to me was screaming in agony.

He'd been shot and he was screaming, "They've shot my mother,

"why did this have to happen, why did they do this?"

And screaming and screaming. And I was trying to calm him down.

At some point the sister also passed away.

The people who were screaming stopped screaming eventually,

you know, as they died, and so it became quieter.

Paul Muriuki, a driver for an American charity, was still alive.

He had seven gunshots.

They shot him at once, and once they realised that he didn't die

they still come and shoot him once again.

It was very painful.

He was a person who loved dialogue to solve issues,

not violence.

He was humble.

In the burger restaurant, it had now been 50 minutes

since Niall and his wife had been shot.

Her legs had been pretty badly shredded.

And she was losing quite a lot of blood.

My shoulder and arm had been very badly hit

and I had, you know, holes big enough to put fingers inside.

And with the, you know, blood I was losing myself

it was harder to stay conscious the whole time.

She was clearly, you know...

..on the edge

and, you know, shaking from what

must have been blood loss, in retrospect.

Erm...

Clearly in a lot of pain, clearly very...

very scared. Erm...

I tried to move closer to her at that point.

Took her hand at one point.

And...

..at some point I'm...

..pretty sure she died.

It was obviously hard to tell, but...

..I don't think she was breathing.

Well, I knew I couldn't do anything else. I closed her eyes.

Took her wedding ring so that it wouldn't get lost.

And...

..just fell back.

I think I lay on her with my head on her shoulder for a little while,

where I tried to get to, so that I could actually reach her

to do mouth to mouth, but...

Yeah.

I dunno, I mean, after that it felt fairly...empty.

We then heard the footsteps coming back. The little boy went quiet.

He understood to play dead at that point.

The terrorists asked, "If there's children alive we'll let them go,

"we do not believe in hurting children."

And I don't know...where it came from but I decided that probably

this was the only chance and the only chance for my children.

Erm, so I stood up.

I said to him, "My children are here, they're alive,

"will you let them go?"

He said, "Yes, but you'll have to stay. The children can go but you'll have to stay."

And so I started trying to get my children to stand up.

I was expecting to hear him, like, shooting them.

Then he asked, "Who's Muslim?" And then my friend's brother, he... I could hear him, like, standing up.

So he stood up and then he said, "I'm Muslim."

And he was like, "You've killed my mother and my sister.

"And I love them very much."

And he was like, "Sorry, we're really, really sorry. Please forgive us."

I started walking with my children,

kind of ignoring the fact that he said that I would have to stay.

Then he said, "Can you take the boy with you?"

I asked the terrorist, I said,

"There's also another girl here who's alive, can I take her too?"

And he sort of looked at her.

He didn't look best pleased but he said OK.

I thought they were up to something because, I mean, they were acting so nice,

and these are the people who have killed so many people.

Cos I couldn't carry the boy myself

so I just sort of threw him in the trolley.

I remember my son saying something to them,

"But it's not good to shoot people," you know.

He said, "You're a bad man, you've got to let everybody go,"

and the man trying to explain himself to them,

"Please forgive us," and he was asking for forgiveness.

At that point I said to my children, "Shut up. Don't say another word.

"Be very quiet. Just keep walking,"

and I just wanted to just keep walking,

you know, towards the exit.

And he was like, "Hey, and remember," so I knew, "This is it."

So I just looked behind me. And then he said, "Become Muslim." I said "Yeah, yeah."

We heard voices of children.

We looked at each other and kind of questioned what was going on,

that there was a woman that was with some children

and she just walked out of Nakumatt and left.

We thought maybe she'd lost her mind.

All you do is you focus and it's one step at a time.

One step, one breath, one step, one breath, and just trying to get out.

And yet my daughter was like the complete opposite,

she was just, you know, strolling along, and I remember her saying,

"Mummy, I don't want to do any more shopping today."

The terrorists had actually given them chocolate bars.

According to my daughter, as they gave my son the Mars Bar,

he said, "No, can I have some chewing gum?"

And Amelie said, "No, no, you've got to take the Mars Bar."

And, you know, it's like they were trying to...appease the children,

and explaining to them what they were doing and why they were

doing it, and kept saying, "We're not monsters, here, have a chocolate."

I can't explain why they asked for forgiveness,

why they said they were sorry.

I mean, you know, how can you shoot somebody one second,

kill women and children and then say, "Oh, now we want to let children go,"

and then kill some more women and children

and then say, "Oh, but we're sorry."

You know, how can you...

It just shows how...they're just mad.

She is injured behind there.

What's your name, what's your name, what's your name?

What's your name?

90 minutes after the attack had begun,

the Kenyan security forces still hadn't gone into the mall.

Yeah, don't stand in open area. Stand fire. Stay on the wall.

There's people dying up there, bleeding to death.

And I can't do all ten on my own.

Some civilians had been trying to get help to the injured

at the children's cooking competition.

Give us time now to go in with the SWAT.

-I'm a soldier myself.

-You're a soldier but not with the SWAT. We are here now.

-I did 25 years in the army.

-Give us time. Can you give us time?!

-I know a safe route.

-I am telling you our SWAT team is here.

Give us time to organise ourselves. Right?!

While the security forces debated what to do,

time was running out for the wounded.

By the time you react people will die!

Blood started spreading all around me.

Well, how long now do I have before I just lose too much blood?

I could feel myself getting a bit weaker.

I actually mouthed to Amanda, "I love you."

Just... I figured I've at least got a chance to say something right!

We lay there for a very long time

and you would expect to see a lot of armed soldiers and all

just coming up the ramp.

Maybe that's what we were expecting. But that didn't happen.

In the absence of an official rescue plan,

a handful of plain-clothes police decided to act on their own.

We were very anxious to go in and see if we can save some lives.

The police were talking something in Swahili, I couldn't understand.

So I told them, "What you guys doing?"

They said, "We're going up."

Goran followed Corporal Ali up the ramp.

I had harnessed all pockets of courage that I had inside me

to come up there.

I was not thinking that I could die, that I could get shot.

I felt invincible.

That's the truth.

At that stage I didn't even know that there were people up there.

I felt very angry.

I felt disgusted...

..with the wanton killing that took place there.

In my line of duty I have never shed tears.

On that day I found tears, you know, dropping from my eyes.

I just ran down like a crazy man,

"We need ambulance! We need ambulance!"

Stretcher, stretcher, please! Stretcher here!

Stay with us.

Simon Belcher had been bleeding for two hours by the time help came.

My survival depended on getting to hospital ASAP.

My doctor said another 10-15 minutes and I would have gone.

Ruhila Adatia, a popular radio host, was seven months pregnant.

She'd been shot in the leg.

I went straight for Ruhila and she opened her eyes

and she told me, "Issa, help me." I said, "No, I'm here.

"I'm getting you out of here."

When we picked her up, she was still talking to me.

When I put her in the ambulance, right, her eyes rolled back...

..and I straightaway told the guy, "She's going into shock."

Ruhila and her unborn child died on the way to hospital.

Ruhila that we lost, she was a Muslim.

She was expecting a baby... of her faith.

So it did not matter, it just did not matter to them.

Whatever it is, let the ambulance crew move out with them!

They need to get out!

A handful of civilians had come to the rooftop

to assist the Red Cross and the plain-clothes police.

We saw the level of destruction that had taken place,

the murder and the killing and the injured people.

And we knew there were survivors in there.

We just said, "Whoever has the balls, we go in.

"The rest, stay."

-HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

-If we have to die, we die.

Now seven men went into the mall - five plain-clothes police

and civilians Harish and Abdul, who were carrying licensed handguns.

We didn't have a command structure.

We were not taking orders from anybody.

Most of the police were still outside.

But we did have the plainclothes police officers who were

with us inside.

When we hit the ground floor now, hey...bullets started flying now.

Those guys, they started showing us that they really meant business.

I clearly saw one of the gunmen. So I took a picture.

Then, I said, "No, because it smells bad."

I said to police, "We have to be careful.

"We can get shot."

I had 14 rounds.

And it didn't quite cross our mind that, you know, we had small guns

and they had big guns. A gun is a gun.

At the end of the day, it's how good you are with it.

The display table opposite the entrance to the supermarket

was now in the crossfire.

It was instantaneous fear and, um... just dread.

The bullets, they're shining - tfu-tuuu.

I felt a big bang on my leg.

I knew I was shot.

I really tried to look like this,

down like this, then I saw a hole in my jeans... to my flesh.

I felt a heavy punch in my back.

I realised that the punch was a bullet. I've been shot.

With the effort that I was making... I released the grip that I had...

on the torn abdomen...

..and I found...

..the intestines, you know, bubbling out.

Goran came and lifted me up.

When I was running with him but he start firing his AK by accident

between our legs

so it was little bit difficult, you know.

He was a very brave guy, you know.

I heard after he was all right.

SHOUTING

GUNSHOTS

As the gun battle raged inside the mall,

the police SWAT team was outside... waiting for orders.

If there was any time that any of us should have run away,

was when our colleague was shot.

At that point in time if there was any coward amongst us

he would have opted out and left.

But nobody left.

By engaging the terrorists at the front entrance

of Nakumatt, Abdul and his group enabled more than

100 trapped civilians to escape, including Katherine's sons.

We asked "Is our mother out, is she safe?"

They responded, "We don't know, just pray".

We really had no clue where she was,

but we knew she was inside Westgate somewhere.

We noticed that there was a lady hiding under a table

and she looked terrified.

The Kenyan lady finally said - "The cops are here."

I couldn't see them

but the other ladies could and they were communicating with them.

We were quite shocked because she was

right in the middle of the crossfire between the gunmen and us.

I signalled to my colleagues, I told them, "You know, there's a lady,

"she's in a bad situation, we need to get her out."

At one point this guy with a black bandanna tied on his head -

you know, my eyes and his locked and he was taunting me.

He was saying "Kuja, kuja!", you know, "Come, come!"

He was taunting us to come closer so that we can engage in a fight.

I'm a Kenyan Somali, a Muslim.

What angered me the most was the fact that they were Muslims and they

were purporting to do whatever they were doing in the name of Islam.

One of the plainclothes policemen threw tear gas,

hoping to push the terrorists further back into Nakumatt.

We started proceeding closer

and closer towards the supermarket entrance.

Diagonally opposite the display table was a pharmacy.

We were much closer to the lady who was hiding under the table,

we were able to communicate with her.

So we told them to run. And she shook her head.

I told him that, "I can't come because we are four ladies and three kids there."

As Abdul prepared to rescue the women behind the display table

he found another group of people hiding in the pharmacy.

He now had only minutes to get them all to safety before the

terrorists could recover from the tear gas and open fire again.

One of the Asian ladies reached out her hands

and signalled that she would carry the baby for me.

I told that lady "Just give me your small baby."

So, I know she can't run with three kids.

So I handed her Petra.

Cos I knew by then my legs were jelly

and I just wouldn't be able to carry all of them.

They told us - "You go one by one."

I prayed my last prayers then I decided, "No..."

I told God, "..no, I'm not dying today."

-SHE CHUCKLES

-"No, no, not today!"

She just knew.

She just knew it was her opportunity to go, and so she ran.

She was very brave. Very brave.

Almost the entire time my mind was on getting out

and when I would get out and what would happen when I got out

and what I would do the rest of the day.

And I kept thinking "How am I supposed to drive home?

"My nerves are completely shot.

"There's just no way that I'm going to be able to drive home."

It was wonderful. We know that it was a miracle.

Move, move, move.

There were just four of us. Everybody was close to each other.

We don't know each other, we all come from different communities

but at that time we were one.

I'll always treasure that moment

because everybody was caring about the other.

Having been forced to the back of the supermarket by the tear gas,

the gunmen were now just feet away from Margie and her baby.

I was thinking - "I've got to slow my breath down,

"cos this baby is going to pick up on the, kind of, extreme fear that

"I'm feeling right now."

I was almost just counting the seconds,

every single second that passed.

And, all of a sudden, it happened, there he was.

I looked up at him

and I just mouthed the words "He's just a baby, he's just a baby,

"he's just a baby." And I must have said it quite a few times.

And he just kept on staring at me.

And after a while he looked to the side at some of his colleagues that

were there and said something in a language that I didn't understand

and someone in a broken voice said, "Lady with baby stand up."

Then, as I'm looking at them, the terrorist that's in the middle

in the front looks at us, sees the baby peering around

and turns his head to the side and, kind of, cocks his head and makes

this cute baby face and goes...

And waves at me and waves at the baby.

Like...

And I just remember thinking, "If they see my face now they're

"going to know how crazy I think this is.

"I can't believe what just happened.

"They're killing women and children and then making baby faces at us

"and waving."

So, I turned around and started walking out.

As I got there this tear gas dropped right at the entrance.

I had to decide - "Do I walk out into the mall area,

from the supermarket, or do I turn around and go back into the supermarket?"

I was like - "I'm not going back to where those guys are.

"I'm not going back to where they just killed everybody."

There were hordes of people, there were security forces outside.

I mean, it felt like millions of people had surrounded the mall.

And I didn't stop. I just kept on running.

The tear gas had actually affected my eyes.

So I started walking towards the main entrance.

On the right side there was the Urban Burger cafe.

So I thought, "I might as well get some water and splash it in my face."

By now, Niall had been bleeding for more than three hours.

I'd lay there, kind of, drifting in and out of consciousness and at

some point I was aware of movement coming into the burger restaurant.

Someone had come over and was, basically,

washing their face

and eyes in the sink that was, more or less, above our heads.

I asked him where he'd been injured and he pointed to his shoulder

and his leg.

So I told him...

"Just bear with me, I'm going to get some help for you

"and we'll get you out of here."

You try and do what you can not to be helpless but

when that kind of situation happens there's a limited set of options.

The biggest thing is not knowing what's happening.

And so you having to make choices without any real

idea of what the consequences of those choices could be.

I mean, it feels wrong, in some ways, calling it unlucky

because someone set out to do this.

But for us to be there, erm, was just a matter of bad luck.

Pablo Ghataurhae had gone to watch the cooking competition

with his family.

When the attack began he was on the rooftop with his grandmother.

Pablo was 17 years old.

He was going to go into university to do mechanical engineering.

He wanted to be a rally driver.

It's funny, he used to make these statements to me at times -

"When I become a rally driver,

"be prepared, Mum...

"I'm going to die early.

"So you be prepared."

He went with his grandma, which I'm proud of.

He looked after her while she was alive

and he's looking after her all the way up there.

The terrorists returned to the meat counter,

looking for anyone hiding or playing dead.

There is a lady who was behind me. She was alive.

The gunmen had been speaking to their masters in Somalia

and needed more minutes for their cellphones.

They said "Where do we find the Safaricom scratch cards?"

So they lady said. "The scratch cards, it is at the tills.

"But I don't know the password."

After that they ask her - "Are you a Kenyan?"

The lady say, yeah, she's a Kenyan.

They ask her if she's a Christian or a Muslim.

The lady told them, "I'm a Christian."

One of them just fired one gunshot and the lady was dead.

Cashier Veronicah Kamau was killed at nine minutes to four,

three hours and 21 minutes into the attack.

She was the last civilian to die at Westgate.

The terrorists left the shop floor

and headed up a service staircase towards the furniture storeroom.

Of perhaps two thousand people at the mall that Saturday,

they had killed 61, including a dozen children and three pregnant women.

Hundreds more were left with permanent injuries.

Three and a half hours after the terrorists had struck,

the police SWAT team finally entered the mall.

But it was too late to save anyone. The massacre was over.

As they worked their way down from the second floor,

on the ground floor a platoon of Kenyan soldiers entered

Nakumatt looking for the terrorists.

They advanced through the vegetable section towards the meat counter,

where six shop workers were still hiding.

We can see them, on that reflection, I told my friend,

"Hey is that police, are they police?"

I opened the door.

They felt I was a terrorist

so they sprayed the bullets towards that side.

The soldiers now fired at anything that moved.

I tried to signal at them as I waved the uniform.

"We are the Nakumatt staff, Nakumatt staff."

Because I felt it was unsafe just to come out physically,

that one, they would have shot me.

Those soldiers, they do not consider, they are just shooting, yeah,

they're just shooting.

As the soldiers fired wildly around them,

the four terrorists were relaxing in the furniture storeroom.

By mistake, the army shot three policemen, one of them fatally.

We put him onto the stretcher and we were rushing him out.

Then, all of a sudden, he started shaking.

He clearly said - "We can't work like this.

"We are the ones who are supposed to be the head of this."

They withdrew completely from the operation.

In the confusion, both the Kenyan army and the police SWAT team

left the mall, just 90 minutes after they'd arrived.

In the furniture storeroom, the Al-Shabaab gunmen prayed.

They had come to kill and be killed.

Now they waited for the Kenyans to attack.

Very little is known about the gunmen.

The youngest was 19, the oldest 23.

All four had arrived in Kenya three months earlier

and scouted Westgate a number of times.

After a few hours in the storeroom the terrorists noticed

the security camera and disconnected it.

Later that night, a squad of Kenyan soldiers crept back into Nakumatt.

With them was a civilian who videoed the meat counter where Amber

and her children had hidden earlier in the day.

Shop worker Fred Bosire, in his white coat,

had been playing dead for eight hours.

I still lied down.

When I saw the military boots and the uniform, now I was relieved.

The shop workers who'd been hiding behind the cold store

were also freed.

They were the last group of civilians to be

rescued from the mall.

I was very lucky. I can say I was very lucky.

Maybe that was my day. That's what I can say.

At 13 minutes past nine a security camera captured

the last recorded image of the terrorists.

The stand-off between the terrorists and the Kenyan army

continued for another 40 hours, during which five soldiers were killed.

Two days after the attack began,

the army fired a high-explosive shell into Nakumatt.

All four terrorists died in the fire.

Their weapons and what remained of their bodies were

later recovered from the ashes.

As Nakumatt burned to the ground,

the security cameras stopped recording.

The mall, which was under army control, was looted.

The Kenyan government stood by the actions of its security forces.

I am satisfied that our disciplined forces have

responded in a professional and effective manner.

We have ashamed and defeated our attackers.

Let us continue to wage a relentless moral war as our forces

conduct the physical battle.

We shall triumph.

Hundreds of miles north, in Somalia, Al-Shabaab also declared a victory.

CHANTING

Leave alone, Islam. Islam, the term Islam means peace. Where is peace?

Where is Islam now the term Islam, where is it?

When you kill innocent children, when you kill women?

I am a Muslim myself.

For now, Westgate remains closed.

It isn't known when it might open again.

Whatever the intended meaning of Al-Shabaab's

spectacle at Westgate, the security cameras revealed it as

little more than the mass murder of defenceless civilians.

I don't really blame them as individuals.

They really were just ordinary men with very,

very wrong ideas about life.

When I spoke to them there was a real calm

and determination about what they were doing.

You know, they were there to send out

a message to the world, however messed up that message was.

And to die doing it.

As long as I've got breath left inside me...

..and a finger to squeeze the trigger...

..I won't let...

..the same thing which happened at Westgate...

..happen again.