An eight-months-pregnant Harvard grad — who had been working as a malaria specialist with the Clinton Foundation — was slaughtered along with her partner in the terror attack on an upscale Nairobi mall.
Dr. Elif Yavuz, 33, was found cradled in the arms of her dead architect boyfriend, Ross Langdon, also 33.
“The loss is immeasurable, absurd and excruciating,’’ wrote Langdon’s mother, Linden, on Facebook on Monday.
Yavuz, a Dutch national, was just two weeks from giving birth, and the couple was believed to have traveled from their home in Tanzania to Nairobi for the delivery because of the Kenyan capital’s better medical facilities.
“I sat with them just this past week and discussed the future and the baby, nagging them to tell me the names they had chosen,’’ Yavuz’s friend, Lisa Baumgartner, wrote on a blog.
“They didn’t want to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, so they had chosen names for both sexes.”
The couple was just about to start their new family after having “dedicated their lives to working for a peaceful world,’’ Australian sculptor and friend Peter Adams wrote on his blog.
“Besides a personal loss for myself, this is a major global loss,” he said.
Yavuz had graduated from the Ivy League school with a Ph.D. this year and had been working with the Clinton organization.
On Facebook, she proudly posted a recent photo of herself with Bill Clinton.
“Elif was brilliant, dedicated, and deeply admired by her colleagues, who will miss her terribly,” the ex-president, wife Hillary Rodham Clinton and daughter Chelsea said in a statement. “Elif devoted her life to helping others, particularly people in developing countries suffering from malaria and HIV/AIDS.”
Langdon, who was born in Tasmania, Australia, was an award-winning architect who worked in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania, creating eco-lodges and socially sustainable tourism in ecologically sensitive locations.
“There just was no dark side to Ross that I ever saw in the 20 or so years I knew him,’’ Adams wrote on the blog.
“Ross was about to start on a $35 million museum centered around the earliest fossil record of humanoids walking: two adults and one child,” he added.
Also among the more than 60 people killed in the massacre were Kofi Awoonor, 78, a former diplomat and respected Ghanaian poet who taught at SUNY Stony Brook in the 1970s.
He was in Nairobi to speak at the Storymoja Hay Festival, a four-day celebration of writing.
A six-months-pregnant, popular Kenyan TV personality also died while co-hosting a kids cooking competition on the mall’s roof.
The woman, Ruhila Adatia-Sood, had been married to a foreign worker for the US Agency for International Development, the organization said.
A rep for a cooking-oil company involved in the competition was killed, too — while attempting to save the kids around him, one account says.
Mitul Shah, the sales and marketing director for Bidco, “died trying to save stranded children — he died as a hero,” “Half Jadhe Half Kyuk” wrote on the KenyaList.com message board.
Other victims included an 8-year-old Indian boy and a 16-year-old Kenyan girl, as well as Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta’s nephew Mbugua Mwangi and Mwangi’s fiancée, Rosemary Wahito.
Pennsylvania native Nick Handler had been in a cafe at the Westgate mall with his 2-year-old daughter, Julia, while his wife, Lyndsay — who is eight months pregnant — was one floor below, he told ABC News by phone. They were reunited 90 minutes later.
Recalling the moment he saw his wife again, Handler said: “Just the look on her face, the emotion, and I think all of the fear and the uncertainty that had been building up. She just let it all out.”