The trial began Wednesday of four men charged in connection with the deadly assault and three-day siege at Kenya's Westgate mall in September, in which Somalia's Al-Qaeda linked al Shabaab militants killed 67 people, Agence France Presse reported. The men on trial are not accused of actually carrying out the attack, but for serving as accomplices to the terrorists.
The four men, Adan Mohamed Abidkadir Adan, Mohamed Ahmed Abdi, Liban Abdullah Omar and Hussein Hassan Mustafah, have all pleaded not guilty to charges of abetting a terrorist group.
"I began to hear gunshots. I made a radio call for help while running to the main entrance. I took shelter in a residential compound until when I saw policemen come," sad Stephen Juma, a witness who described how he had been outside the mall and was directing traffic before three men lept out of a car leading up to the assault.
The attack, according to al-Shabaab, was retribution and a warning to Kenya for the country to pull out its troops out of southern Somalia where they have been fighting Islamists as part of an African Union force. Mohammed Abdinur Said and Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow were named in court documents as gunmen who participated in the September assault.
All four men on trial are all ethnic Somalis, but it is unclear whether they are Somali or Kenyan citizens, according to AFP. "Western officials have suggested that as many as 94 people could have died in total in the attack. Bodies were buried under tonnes of rubble after part of the mall's roof collapsed at the end of the raid following an intense fire that burned for weeks," as reported by AFP.
