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Kenya mourns mall shooting victims

NAIROBI – Investigators looking into the Kenya mall attack have determined the attackers or their associates rented and operated a small store in the mall a year before the attack, according to a Kenyan intelligence official involved in the investigation.

This is an indication that the planning for the attack began more than a year ago.

Al-Shabaab, a Somalia-based terrorist group with links to al-Qaeda, has said it carried out the attack.

In addition to five terrorists, at least 67 people are confirmed dead in the attack.

Officials fear that number could rise — as many as 63 people are still unaccounted for — as they sift through the rubble left from the collapse of three floors of the expansive facility.

Near the Ugandan border, authorities picked up three people in connection with the mall attack investigation, the Kenyan intelligence official said.

The three are among several people now being held and questioned by police over the attack Saturday at the Westgate mall.

In a news conference in Nairobi on Friday, Kenya’s Interior Minister Joseph Ole Lenku said that eight suspects are being held for questioning and three others were released after interrogation. It isn’t clear whether his count included the three picked up near Uganda.

In an earlier report, a man who cast himself as a victim of the attack gave himself away as a possible suspect when a machine-gun magazine fell out of his pocket as he was being evacuated, a Kenyan counter-terrorism source said Thursday.

This Kenyan national, who was injured in the ordeal, is currently being held in a hospital at a military airbase, according to the source.

It was not immediately clear if this man is one of the at least 10 individuals who Kenyan officials have said are in custody on suspicion of taking part in the Westgate Mall attack.

There is increasing concern that some perpetrators escaped the mall along with fleeing civilians, and thus remain at large, US law enforcement officials say. US forensic investigators were granted access to the ravaged mall on Thursday. – CNN