Kenyan officials have identified the gunmen who attacked the Westgate Shopping Mall on Sept. 21 as Norwegian-Somalis that were part of Al-Shabab, a group of Somali Islamist militant extremist, officials said on Friday, the Associated Press reported.
Four gunmen took over the mall around 12 p.m. and opened fire on shoppers, which turned into a four-day siege between the attackers and Kenyan security forces. The mall caught fire and collapsed in certain areas, the AP reported.
Officials identified one of the shooters as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow as charred body parts were brought from the excavation site where the mall's supermarket collapsed, the same area where the gunmen were held up, Reuters reported.
According to Reuters, two big plastic boxes about a foot-wide have been filled with charred body parts believed to be the remains of the four shooters. Four Ak-47 rifles, believed to have belonged to the shooters, were also recovered from the rubble, the AP reported.
Other items also recovered on Friday included 11 magazines of ammunition, allegedly used by the attackers, and a rocket propelled grenade, used by Kenyan forces, were also recovered, according to the AP.
Dhuhulow is just one of four believed attackers who stormed the mall about four weeks ago. According to Norwegian tax records, Dhuhulow was born in 1990 and has had an address in Norway since 2009, the AP reported.
According to the New York Times, investigators are now questioning relatives and friends of Dhuhulow, 23, who is a Norwegian citizen born in Somalia. Officials are trying to determine whether he was one of the four militants captured on surveillance footage inside the mall in Nairobi.
The Chairman of Parliament's Defense and Foreign Relations, Ndung'u Gethenji, said the bodies had been pulled from under the rubble in a part of the mall which had collapsed, leading officials to believe that the corpses uncovered today might be that of the attackers, Reuters reported.
"All the indications are that they are the attackers, the area they were excavating is consistent with the area (the gunmen) were trapped in during the operation," Gethenji told Reuters.
Kenyan security officials said it's possible these are the remains of the attackers, but they will not confirm until the forensics tests are carried out. The two boxes contained the charred remains were taken to the morgue and a post-mortem will be carried out late Friday, according to the AP.
According to AP, a man named Yussef living in another Scandinavian country met with the identified gunman at a Somali immigrant gathering in Oslo, the capital of Norway, in 2008. Yussef said the man's name was Abdi and that he seemed "pretty radical."
Yussef said "he was mad" and that "he didn't feel at home in Norway," according to the AP. Yussef has declined to give his last name in fear of repercussions; he has not had contact with the shooter but added that several people he knew thought they had recognized him from the mall's footage. "We said that it could be him when we looked at the video."
The Somali Islamic militant group al-Shabab has claimed responsibility for the attack and said it was in retaliation for Kenya sending troops into Somali after extremists. They have threatened to carry out more attacks unless Kenya withdraw its forces from Somalia, a demand Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta will not meet, the AP reported.
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