The terrorists who laid siege to a luxury Nairobi mall have finally been defeated, Kenya’s president said Tuesday as sickening new details surfaced about the atrocities they committed.
Kenyan authorities said the mall was now under complete military control as they set the death toll at 72 — but warned that the body count would rise.
The local morgue was told to prepare for up to 60 more bodies.
“We have ashamed and defeated our attackers — that part of our task is completed,’’ Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a televised address.
But “our losses are immense,’’ Kenyatta admitted, noting that at least 61 civilians and six soldiers had been confirmed dead so far. Five of the estimated 12 to 15 terrorists also were killed, and 11 suspects are in custody, he said.
The grim tally came amid reports that the jihadis had mutilated their victims’ corpses, burning their faces and cutting off their hands to make it difficult for officials to identify them, according to the Daily Mail.
Kenyatta said authorities were still trying to recover bodies trapped in the rubble of three floors that collapsed amid artillery explosions and fires. The killers piled up bodies against doors and booby-trapped sections with explosives to thwart rescue attempts, sources said.
The terror group al-Shabab plotted the siege weeks in advance, according to a report. Members of the Somali-based group obtained blueprints of the Westgate Mall and rehearsed the mayhem before slipping over the border, according to The New York Times.
They even had an employee stash machine guns inside a shop at the mall. One terrorist packed civilian clothes so he could easily walk away from the carnage with shoppers, the paper said.
The terror team took to Twitter on Tuesday to spread its vile message. Although the social-networking site suspended a few accounts allegedly connected to the killers, more kept popping up. One, @HSM_PR, calling itself HSM Press Office (taken from the terror organization’s full name, Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen), taunted with tweets such as, “One things is clear, no hostage is getting out alive.”
Kenyan Foreign Minister Amina Mohammed said Monday that “two or three American” teens and “one Brit” were among the savages who openly targeted non-Muslims, including women and children.
The attacker from Britain was a woman who has “done this many times before,” Mohammed said, suggesting she might have been the notorious “White Widow,” Samantha Lewthwaite.
A female worker at the mall claimed she might have locked eyes with the infamous “Widow” before the terrorist took aim directly at her and unleashed a hail of bullets.
But the employee miraculously survived.
“She stopped and aimed at me and then opened fire,” the worker told the Daily Mail. “All of the bullets did not hit me. I don’t know how that happened.”
But al-Shabab denied to The Associated Press on Tuesday that any woman was involved.
“We have an adequate number of young men who are . . . ready to sacrifice their lives for the sake of Allah . . . so there is no need for us to employ our sisters in the battlefield,” the group said.
But there were also uplifting tales from the tragedy.
An off-duty member of Britain’s Special Air Service was having coffee in the mall at the time and escaped, only to rush back in a dozen times to save people, the Telegraph of London said.
“What he did was so heroic,’’ a friend said. “He went back in 12 times and saved 100 people. Imagine going back in when you knew what was going on inside.”