Kenya Mall Attack Current-Heather DelGuercio

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/world/africa/2-more-militant-attacks-unsettle-kenya.html?hp&_r=0

            A few days ago, armed assailants rushed into a local mall and killed numerous people. In addition to the mall attack, militants killed three more people close to the border of Somalia on Thursday. Police claim that there were a total of two attacks. The first was on Wednesday night when a bystander was killed. The second was on Thursday when militants raided a Kenyan police camp and killed two policemen and burning almost a dozen vehicles.

            The people that were blamed were the Shabab, the Somali that have taken responsibility or killing more than 60 people that were at the mall.

            Some outside investigators, including the F.B.I have been placed in the area of Nairobi to help solving the case.

            A police robot was used to navigate inside the mall because there were assumptions that the whole entire property was covered in explosives. Some grenades were picked up in the process.

            Witnesses said that one of the perpetrators was a woman by the name of Samantha Lewthwaite who converted to Islam after marrying a man who was a suicide bomber. On Thursday there was a warrant for her arrest, although it wasn’t specifically for the mall massacre but for charges from 2011 of possessing explosives.

            After the attack and the way the government has handled it, there were a flood of tweets from locals. One woman in particular tweeted that the people were asking so many questions because they are scared an attack like this will happen again because it appeared to easy to do the first time.  In addition to turning to twitter for questions, many others are tweeting #weareone as a way of staying united during the aftermath.

            Several children were killed during the attack, one being a 9^th grade girl from the International School of Kenya (ISK). After three days of trying to get the attackers out of the mall, an American security advisor gave Kenyan soldiers a can of tear gas and said, “Use this one first, courtesy of the ninth grade of I.S.K.” It was said that that can of tear gas enabled them to get the assailant out and shoot him down.

            I really liked this article because not only does it show how strong and unified Kenya stayed but also how helpful outside sources were to solving the case and handling the crisis. I was expecting this article to be completely from the US point of view being from the New York Times. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the US’s help was hardly mentioned because it focused so primarily on the Kenyans which I found refreshing.