Excerpts from The Guardian.CO.UK
The Westgate mall in Nairobi, Kenya, is left in ruins on Wednesday after the terrorist attack that began on Saturday. Three storeys of the buildings have collapsed and smoke is rising from the rubble as sources say hundreds of bodies could remain underneath the wreckage. A total of 72 people are known to have died in the incident so far
“One attacker is still alive,” said the source, who is involved in the rescue operation inside Westgate, and who asked not to be named, adding: “There were 200 workers in Nakumatt [supermarket] and 800 people shopping. The walls of Nakumatt collapsed. There are a lot of bodies inside.”
“We came here yesterday to identify the body, and we came again at 8am today for the postmortem,” she said. “The police say that the doctor refuses to do the postmortem, and the doctor says it’s the police. What is this?”
There is mounting criticism of the Kenyan authorities’ handling of the victims and of the attack itself.
Muema said it represented a serious failure of intelligence. “There was no intelligence, nobody knew that this attack was going to happen, and everyone was caught by surprise.
“Then the initial response was to deal with it as a robbery, not as a terrorist attack, which only served to aggravate the situation.
“And then when the magnitude of the attack was revealed, the agencies were not unified under a single command structure. No one knew who anyone else was and there may well have been friendly fire.”