REPORT: Gunmen storm Nairobi Mall, at least 25 killed

                           
Militant gunmen stormed a shopping mall in Nairobi on Saturday killing at least 25 people, including children, and sending scores fleeing into shops, a cinema and onto the streets in search of safety.             

Shooting continued hours after the initial assault as troops surrounded the Westgate mall and police and soldiers combed the building, hunting down the attackers shop by shop. A police officer inside the building said the gunmen were barricaded inside the Nakumatt supermarket, one of Kenya's biggest chains.            

"We got three bodies from this shop," he said, standing a dozen metres from the supermarket entrance and pointing to a children's shoe shop, where blood lay in pools.          

He turned to a nearby hamburger bar where music still played and food lay abandoned in a similar bloody scene. "And a couple of bodies here."           

The Westgate mall attack was the single biggest since al Qaeda's east Africa cell bombed the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, in 1998 killing more than two hundred people. In 2002, the same militant cell attacked an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli jet in a coordinated attack.            

Two plainclothes policemen lay on the floor with guns trained on the Nakumatt supermarket entrance. Tiles were smeared with blood, bullet casings were strewn on the floor and shop windows were shattered. A police man dragged the corpse of a young girl across the floor and lay her on a stretcher.             

Some local television stations reported hostages had been taken, but there was no official confirmation.             

Police helicopters circled above shortly after the initial assault as armed police shouted "get out! get out!" and scores of shoppers fled the sand-coloured stone building. Smoke poured out of one entrance and witnesses said they heard grenade blasts.            

Others said they saw about five armed assailants storm the  mall and that the incident appeared to be an attack rather than an armed robbery.              

The mall includes a number of Israeli-owned businesses, though it was not immediately clear if these were the target of the attack. At least four Israeli nationals escaped the assault, one with light wounds.             

"As of now this appears to be an internal Kenyan incident,  that is, a terrorist attack but not one that specifically targeted Israelis," a spokeswoman at Israel's Foreign Ministry said.         

Kenya's Ministry of Interior said: "It is a possibility that it is an attack by terrorists, so we are treating the matter very seriously."

In turn, the Kenyan Presidency said on Twitter that Kenyan security forces have arrested one of the gunmen who attacked a shopping mall in the capital, killing at least 25 people, on Saturday.        

In a separate tweet, the east African country's head of police, David Kimaiyo, said several other assailants had been pinned down after soldiers and police moved into the mall to hunt down the attackers.

For its part, the U.S. State Department said it had reports that American citizens were injured in an attack when gunmen stormed a shopping mall in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, and it condemned the shooting as a "senseless act of violence".          

"We have reports of American citizens injured in the attack, and the U.S. Embassy is actively reaching out to provide assistance," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a statement.          
   
This comes as the Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera said the Somali Islamist militant group al Shabaab had told the channel that al Shabaab carried out an attack on a Nairobi shopping mall on Saturday.

Somalia's al Shabaab militant group said that it was in contact with "Mujahideen" gunmen who attacked a shopping mall in the Kenyan capital on Saturday.         

The al Qaeda-linked militant group, which is battling peacekeepers from Kenya and other African nations, said the mass shooting was justice for crimes committed by Kenyan troops in Somalia.        

"For long we have waged war against the Kenyans in our land, now it's time to shift the battleground and take the war to their land," al Shabaab said on its official Twitter handle @HSM--Press.

For the full report, please click on the VIDEO above       


REUTERS