One Nairobi mall gunman identified
Print Edition
Almost one month after gunmen attacked an upscale mall in Kenya, one of them has been identified as a Norwegian-Somali, officials said yesterday, as charred body parts taken from a collapsed portion of the shopping center awaited forensics analysis to determine if they were the remains of the assailants.
The suspect was identified as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, the first time officials have confirmed having a real name of one of possibly four attackers from the Somali militant group al-Shabab who stormed the mall four weeks ago on Saturday. Norwegian tax records show a Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow was born in 1990 and was registered at an address in Larvik, southern Norway, as late as 2009.
Charred pieces of bodies, enough to fill two plastic boxes about a foot wide and across, have been recovered from the part of the Westgate Mall that had collapsed as security forces battled the terrorists, officials said yesterday. Four AK-47 rifles believed to have been used by the attackers were also recovered from the rubble.
A Kenyan security official said it is possible the remains are of the attackers but it would not be definitively known until tests are carried out. The two boxes were taken to the morgue on Thursday, and yesterday Western forensic examiners arrived and locked the boxes containing the remains, a morgue official said. A post-mortem was to be carried out later in the day.
FBI agents have been investigating since soon after gunmen invaded Westgate Mall in Nairobi on September 21.
One man living in another Scandinavian country, who only gave his first name, Yussuf, said he believes he had met the Norwegian-Somali gunman at a gathering of Somali immigrants in Oslo, Norway’s capital, in 2008.
Yussuf recalled the man’s name as Abdi and said he was associated with “pretty radical” circles in Norway.
“He was mad. He didn’t feel at home in Norway,” Yussuf said, declining to give his last name out of fear of reprisals from al-Shabab sympathizers. Yussuf said he had not had any contact with the man since then.
Newly released video from closed-circuit TV security cameras installed at the mall shows that four gunmen entered the mall and casually opened fire on shoppers, the beginning of a four-day siege that resulted in a massive fire and the mall’s partial collapse.
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