• Gunmen targeted 30 children who were taking part in a cooking event
• As many as 30 hostages were taken by the Al Shabaab terrorists
• Sources said militants hurled a severed hand and head from a balcony
• The Kenyan military didn’t believe the hostages would survive their ordeal

Children as young as five were shot up to five times by the terrorists that carried out the Westgate mall massacre, it has emerged.

The attack, carried out last week by gunmen from Somalia-based terrorist group Al Shabaab, left 67 people dead, including six Britons.

New accounts of the extremists’ merciless assault reveal for the first time the fate of some of the 30 children who attended a cooking event at the mall. Some of them were as young as 12.

One girl at the event, 16-year-old Nehal Vekariya, was shot through the eye, according to The Sunday Times.

The paper reports her father’s final phone conversation with her.

He said: ‘She said “I’m okay, I’m with friends, call Mummy fast and tell her I’m okay”.’  

When her mother called her she heard yelling and then gunshots, then the line went dead. She had been cut down at close range.

The paper also reports that witnesses describe children as young as five being hit up to  five times by the terrorists, as they roamed the mall looking for victims.

 Mitul Shah, 38, meanwhile, a London-born father of one caught up in the siege, was hailed a ‘hero and a star’ for reportedly offering hicmself as a hostage to allow children to escape from militants.

According to The Sunday Times, one of the gunmen told victims: ‘You didn’t spare our women and children. Why should we spare yours?’

Firefighters, police and soldiers were faced with horrific scenes when they entered the mall.

One firefighter told the paper how he was sent in to put out a fire in the CCTV control room, started by rocket-propelled grenades that were fired by soldiers.

He heard screaming from a balcony, then gunshots, then saw blood dripping from above. Some security men were crying, he said. Then a severed hand and a head wrapped in cloth landed on the floor next to them.

A Western security official told The Sunday Times: ‘They were saying to the troops, “If you come any closer we will execute a hostage”.’

The extremists had piled dead bodies up against the doors to hinder their progress.

It’s understood from intelligence sources that the Kenyan military deliberately caved in the top floor car park to kill them, on the assumption that if the hostages weren’t already dead, they soon would be.

Al Shabaab was making proclamations on social media that they weren’t willing to negotiate.

As many as 30 hostages were taken by the terrorists according to the British High Commission, with many of them still unaccounted for.

A British SAS unit was on standby to help the Kenyan military, but they weren’t called in.

Eight suspects are being held over the attack according to Kenya’s Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku said. Three others who had been detained were released. At least five attackers also were killed. 

 However, there are fears that some of the extremists, including suspected British terrorists Samantha Lewthwaite, may be on the loose, having escaped through the city’s drainage system.

A unnamed source told The Sun on Sunday: ‘It may have been a way out for some of the terrorists. They could have escaped like sewer rats.’

On Saturday leaked intelligence briefings revealed that the Kenyan government had been warned some months ago Al Shabaab was planning an attack in Nairobi between September 13 and 21.

One report named suspected  terrorists in Nairobi who were ‘planning to mount suicide attacks on an undisclosed date, targeting Westgate Mall’ and a cathedral.

Mutea Iringo, principal secretary in the Ministry of Interior, said: ‘Every day we get intelligence and action is taken as per that intelligence and many attacks averted. But the fact that you get the intelligence does not mean something cannot happen.

‘What we are saying is that we are at war, and that every day some young Kenyan is being radicalised by al Shabaab to kill Kenyans.’

The murderous attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Kenya has brought home the need for ‘permanent vigilance’ against terrorism in the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron said today.

Mr Cameron said he had no intelligence of plans for an ‘imminent’ attack in Britain but acknowledged that there was a ‘worry’ that British-based Somalis trained by the extremist Al-Shabaab group in the east African country might return to the UK with the intention of committing outrages.

He said that he had chaired meetings of the Government’s Cobra emergency contingency committee over the past week to discuss the implications of the Westgate attack.

Contingency plans have already been put in place in the period following the similar attacks in Mumbai, India, in 2008, he said.

Mr Cameron told BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show: ‘We have been looking at this for a long time because of the appalling attack that happened in Mumbai in India.

‘I have personally chaired a whole series of meetings years ago, but again actually this week, to check that we have got everything in place to prepare for those sorts of attacks.

‘We don’t have intelligence that something is about to happen, but it pays to be very, very prepared, very, very cautious, and to work out we have everything in place we can to deal with awful events like this.’

Asked whether he was concerned that British-based Somalis might export terror from the African state to the UK, Mr Cameron said: ‘There is always a worry of that and there is a hotbed of terrorism in Somalia that spills over into other countries, and we are concerned about that and follow that.

‘What it shows I think is that we have to keep going against Islamist extremism, whether that is people that are home-grown in our own country or whether it is extremism that is fomenting either on the Horn of Africa or in West Africa or in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

‘It goes to this whole argument about why we need well-funded intelligence services, why we need to be engaged in the world, we need to share intelligence with others and why we have to be permanently vigilant.

‘I take these responsibilities incredibly seriously, I chair the Cobra meetings myself and I make sure that everything from ambulance to fire to police, that everything is prepared.

‘We don’t have intelligence about anything imminent, but of course when that Mumbai attack happened and you see what happened in Kenya, any responsible government would look at its own processes and procedures, and say how would we cope with something like that?’

source: Mail Online

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