During the terrorist attack on
Kenya’s Westgate Mall that happened on Sept. 21 and it was 12:20 p.m., and
shots and explosions would go on for hours at the popular shopping complex. Kenya
has been the scene of various attacks attributed to terrorist elements.
It is one of the most dramatic
moments of the dreadful assault on Kenya’s Westgate mall. The moment where a
four year old boy, whose mother had negotiated with an al-Qaeda inspired
terrorist for his and other children’s release told the gunman. Here one of the
ladies, the mother of that young boy, shares of her family’s terrifying ordeal
at the hands of the militant Islamist group Al Shabaab.
A French national lady with her husband
deliberates how she was badly injured and also witnessed the deaths of many
around her and how she successfully pleaded for the lives of her two children
and two others when she came face to face with the gunman.
She says “It was a sunny Saturday
morning when she arrived at the Westgate Shopping Mall with her six-year-old
daughter and four-year-old son”. Having driven through Nairobi's streets that
heads to the shopping Centre she found the basement car park was already
filling up. She stopped and with youngsters in tow passed the security monitors
waving metal-identifying wands and poking into bags, and walked up into the
central atrium. She went into the vast two-storey Nakumatt supermarket, to do
"a proper big shop, the kind that you do every couple of weeks," she
remembered. "We were pretty much finished and I'd got the kids near the
tills and then I remembered I wanted to get a bottle of wine." But as the
35-year-old popped back into the store and her children, waited by the
checkout, an ordinary Saturday shop began to spiral rapidly into a nightmare. "Lots
of screaming" followed by "gunshots outside the mall" was her
first memories of the attack. "I started running towards my kids, running
against the crowd. I found them hanging on to the trolley, with almost no one
else around them, everybody else had scattered," she said.
She quickly picked up her youngest child and
together the family ran towards the back of the store. She remembers people
milling around, thinking it would "blow over". She joined a group
trying to leave via a back exit but people were running back in, saying that
there was shooting on that side as well. "The gunfire was going off
constantly: every 15 seconds you would hear a shot," she said.
The cowering group still thought
it was a robbery and that the gunmen would leave after clearing out the tills.
But as time went on – time which felt "like eternity" – She realized
that "it wasn't going to stop very quickly".
In order to hide better, she took
her children further back into the meat section and tried to "squeeze them
under" the large fridges there, before lying on top of them. They were
soon joined by several others. "And then I realized I'd been shot. I felt
the physical force going into my body. I was petrified and didn't move much,
but I kept wriggling my toes and thinking, if I can feel my toes I'm going to
be OK."
"And then it stopped, the
firing stopped. And he walked away. People around me started screaming: people
who had been shot. "I said, 'You've got to be quiet or they'll come back'.
I kept squeezing his hand and said, 'Hold my hand, close your eyes and pretend
to be dead'. At some point, the footsteps came back – we were all very scared.
He said: 'If there are any children alive here, we'll let them go, we won't
hurt them'. But nobody moved."
"And then, I don't know why,
I don't know where it came from, even now I can't imagine why on earth I
decided … I stood up." "Probably I thought it was our last chance – I
said my kids are here and alive, please let them go. He said fine, but you'll
have to stay. And then he started talking to me.We just want people to
understand that they can't come to our homes and kill us … we will do the same
to them," he said, speaking in good English with a slight accent. "I
want you to forgive us."
The Gunman wanted to speak to her
and said while also assuring
her that they wouldn't be hurt as they tried to exit the mall. He then noticed
that she'd been shot and apologized to her. "I'm sorry for what happened
to you," he said. The group of five – one adult, four children, two shot,
all petrified – made their way across the atrium, past a "blown out"
car, a prize giveaway, past several dead bodies lying on the floor.
Two weeks after the kenya attack, she
is still recovering in hospital. She was shot in the left thigh but she was
still going through the pain. The family estimates that an hour passed between
the shooting and reaching an ambulance outside.
"I just wish they didn't
have to see any of this or go through any of this, but I'm very thankful that
they're alive whomsoever I was with. She paused before adding quietly: “And so
very sorry for the people who didn't make it."
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