
[h=1]Westgate: Death, Destruction and Disappearing of Property[/h] By
Mehul Gohil | October 5, 2013
180

Damaged shops next to the main entrance of the Westgate Mall. [RUKMINI CALLIMACHI/AP]
I was inside the Westgate mall on Sept. 30th and the day after, helping to clear out our branch store.
The place is in a mess.
Nakumatt is totally bazookaed. Burnt out, cratered in and looks like the U.S. marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983.
Bullet holes everywhere. In the walls, in the window glasses. At the Adidas Shop on the second floor, the black mannequins were shot in the crotch areas. In Onami Kitchen Bar, also on the second floor, there was a glass mysteriously sitting on a table. Something to do with Newtons second law. Theres a bullet hole on one side of the glass and another on the exact opposite side. Bullet went through it fast and clean. The glass did not shatter. We were passing that glass around.
The mall is flooded with water. The sprinklers must have come on at some point. You have to walk in gumboots. Without gumboots you improvise. Like some of the other tenants, I put my booted feet into two Nakumatt plastic carrier bags and tied the handles around my shins. We were like moon men with blue and white plastic bags on our feet.
Then there is the gross and foul smell that emanated from Nakumatt. You know at once there are a lot of bodies buried inside the supermarket. But after half an hour or so you get used to it. You cant smell it anymore.
There is food, clothes, blood, coins, papers and assorted electronic debris floating in the shallow waters on all floors. Glass pebbles everywhere. All the ATMs have been blown apart. You can see their robot insides. On the ground floor, there are empty Tusker bottles all over the place. The man at Sir Henrys showed me a spot on the floor at Dormans. Coagulated blood clumps all over. They look like stromatolites. He says he saw this guy being shot. Nobody has cleaned this place up. They have just let the water from the sprinklers blur the bloody catastrophe. Some of the tables at Dormans have leftover food on the plates. The pie counter is still filled with pies. And cakes. Houseflies everywhere. There are no lights working. No stima. I saw the whole place in cave-light.
Later on, the man from Sir Henrys, another from Basic Intimates and I went into Art Cafe to talks to the guys there. The sunlight spills in better at Art Cafe. A man named Moshe showed us the bottles of Tusker and sprites on the tables. The Sir Henrys guy says 150 suits were taken from his place. The Basic Intimates guy adds that his best boxers and almost all his g-strings were taken. Moshe tells us officers from the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) scooped out all the ice cream at Mamma Mia. Our patriots were cooling off in the heat of battle. There is just a thin melted sludge left inside the stainless-steel bowls at Mamma Mia. I tell them they must have crowbarred the cash register at my shop. All the Saturday takings gone. We speculate how much there was in all the tills. How much was the gathering? Fifty Million? One hundred million says Moshe in his Tel-Aviv drawl. Moshe says they were clever to take out the electricity.
No video ever recorded them in the act.
Later on I was supervising the loading of shop goods into the canter, parked at the main Westgate entrance. Two helmeted KDF soldiers man this entrance point. Then two other non-helmeted KDF soldiers came. One was holding a black bag. He put the black bag in between the two helmeted soldiers. The four of them saw me looking at them, so one of them moved in between the two helmeted fellows, trying to block my view of the bag. But I could see it. They took out wallet after wallet from the black bag. They took out phones which they quickly put into their pockets. The KDF army uniform has many pockets. I guess the act of Nazis picking out the gold teeth and jewelry and stuff from dead people is also a Kenyan practice. And the KDF guys looked young and happy. Its like they had just come out of the house after having a hearty meal.
Source:
Westgate: Death, Destruction and Disappearing of Property - Sahan Journal