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Before Kenya Attack, Rehearsals and Planting of MachineGuns

NAIROBI, Kenya — The plot was hatched weeks or months ago on Somali

soil, by the Shabab’s “external operations arm,” officials say. A team of

English-speaking foreign fighters was carefully selected, along with a target:

Nairobi’s gleaming Westgate mall.

The building’s blueprints were studied, down to the ventilation ducts. The

attack was rehearsed and the team dispatched, slipping undetected through

Kenya’s porous borders, often patrolled by underpaid — and deeply corrupt —

border guards.

A day or two before the attack, powerful belt-fed machine guns were secretly

stashed in a shop in the mall with the help of a colluding employee, officials

say. At least one militant had even packed a change of clothes so he could slip

out with fleeing civilians after the killings were done.



That is the picture emerging from American security officials of the massacre at

the Westgate mall, which killed scores of people over the weekend. After a

four-day standoff, President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya claimed Tuesday to

have finally “ashamed and defeated our attackers,” declaring that the last

militants still holed up inside the mall had been killed, though the bodies of many civilians, perhaps dozens, had yet to be recovered.

Mr. Kenyatta said that “intelligence reports had suggested that a British woman

and two or three American citizens may have been involved,” but that he could

not confirm those reports. American officials said that they had not determined

the identities of the attackers and were awaiting DNA tests and footage from

the mall’s security cameras, but that they did know the massacre had been

meticulously planned to draw “maximum exposure.”

“They had people in there, they had stuff inside there,” said an American

security official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized

to speak publicly. “This was all ready to go when the shooters walked in.”

Kenya is now entering an official three-day period of mourning to mark one of

the most unsettling episodes in its recent history. The authorities here, in a

country widely perceived as an oasis of peace and prosperity in a troubled

region, are struggling to answer how 10 to 15 Islamist extremists could lay siege

to a shopping mall, killing more than 60 civilians with military-grade weaponry,then hold off Kenyan security forces for days.

On multiple occasions, the Kenyan government said the mall was under its

control, only to have fighting burst out again. Earlier on Tuesday, the Shabab,

the Somali Islamist group that has taken responsibility for the attack, bragged in

a Twitter message that their fighters were “still holding their ground.”

Western security officials fear that several fighters slipped out of the mall

during the mayhem of the attack, dropping their guns and disguising

themselves as civilians, an account echoed by some witnesses.

And the death toll could keep going up. The Kenya Red Cross said Tuesday

that more than 50 people were missing.

The way the attack was carried out may have had something to do with the

recent killing of Omar Hammami, a Shabab fighter who grew up in Alabama



and became a phantomlike figure across the Somali deserts, known by his nom

de guerre: Abu Mansoor Al-Amriki, “the American.” Mr. Hammami was fatally

shot by another wing of the Shabab less than two weeks ago.

One reason for the rift was Mr. Hammami’s complaints that the Shabab hadbecome too brutal toward fellow Muslims under the leadership of the group’s

emir, Ahmed Abdi Godane. That brutality, Mr. Hammami said, was the reason

the Shabab had become so unpopular in Somalia and lost so much territory

recently.

Stig Jarle Hansen, a Norwegian researcher who has published a book on the

Shabab, said this rift might explain why the militants in the Nairobi mall

decided to spare the lives of many Muslims. In the past, the Shabab have killed

countless Muslims in Somalia with suicide bombs and buried Muslim girls upto their necks in sand and stoned them.

“Even Osama bin Laden criticized Godane for being too harsh,” Mr. Hansen

said. “This attack might have been Godane’s way of saying, ‘See, I’m not so

harsh — to Muslims.’ ”

His accent was “light,” Mr. Manji recalled, saying it definitely was not Kenyan.

American officials — who said they based their reconstruction of the plot onintelligence reports, witness statements and intercepted electronic messages —

say the Shabab may have recruited English speakers from the United States and

possibly other Western countries so that they would be able to operate

effectively in Kenya, where English, along with Swahili, is the national

language. Some survivors, including a newspaper vendor who watched one

militant mercilessly shoot a toddler in the legs, said other gunmen had been

young and either Somali or Arab.

American officials said the militants must have had a back office in Kenya, asafe house to finalize their plot and store their guns. Witnesses said several

militants had toted G3 assault rifles, a bulky weapon that Kenyan security

services use. Intelligence analysts say this may mean the militants acquired their

weapons from corrupt Kenyan officers, who are known to sell or rent out their

guns, charging as little as a few dollars an hour.



After killing scores of shoppers, the militants retreated into a supermarket and

used belt-fed machine guns to hold off the Kenyan forces, killing at least six

members.

“You don’t bring something like a crew-served weapon through the door,” an American official said, referring to heavy machine guns. “Those must have

been stored well beforehand.”

Another mystery: the women. Many witnesses have been emphatic that they

saw at least two female militants, armed to the teeth and dressed in fatigues.

Earlier, Kenyan officials asserted that there had been no women among the

shooters, but on Tuesday Mr. Kenyatta seemed to revive the possibility that

one of the assailants was a British woman.

Several intelligence analysts in Nairobi speculated that the woman

was Samantha Lewthwaite, a Muslim convert who had been married to one of

the suicide bombers who struck London in 2005.

Kenyan authorities suspected that Ms. Lewthwaite had risen up through the

ranks of extremist groups and was leading a terrorism cell on the Kenyan coast;

though they nearly swooped in on her in 2011, she escaped. In Kenya, she is

now known as “the white widow.”

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