Why last man to be rescued out of Nakumatt appeared suspect

Samuel Maina narrates his ordeal.

Samuel Maina emerged from the Westgate Mall covered in alcohol 36 hours after the siege.

He looked confused and dehydrated. The media framed him as a drunkard. The police took him up as a suspect. He had a different ID on him.

He was the last man to come out alive, and he had not been hurt. Everything around and about him did not add up. The country was also bleeding for answers and he seemed a probable scapegoat.

But for Maina, the turn of events on that fateful day had just conspired to make his world turn upside down.

Maina had woken up at his Kamoteini home in Nairobi‘s Kabete estate a jovial man. He left his wife and three kids in the house after having breakfast of tea and a slice of bread.

The Nakumatt employee recalls that he was at work by 7.45am that Saturday. He was a cashier at the supermarket. He worked on the ground floor in one of the middle tills, right in the centre of fire. „Customers had lined up to pay when I heard gunfire. At first I thought they were just robbers attacking a bank next to the mall. But I was wrong,“ Maina recalls.

“That is when people started running inside the mall. They were screaming. But when I saw the bullets flying into the mall, I stood up and ran to the back of the shop.“

Over two hours later, police came into the mall but there were no shooters in sight. They recognised him as an employee at Nakumatt and asked him to show them around.

“There was this group of people who were so afraid and had locked themselves in the store by the time police came. Unfortunately, the person who had the key to that store had also disappeared. So police asked me to show them the alternative route which was by the escalator leading to the store.“

On their way up, the shooting started once again, but this time was more intense. „As we went up, accompanied by one of my supervisors, the terrorist who was hiding at the fridge started firing at us. I ran into the wines and spirits shop amid heavy gunfire. Glasses were breaking and I hid on the floor,“ Maina narrates. „Alcohol was flowing all over the floor,“ he adds.

That is how his clothes absorbed alcohol spilling on the floor. He says there was no time to sip alcohol. It was a life and death situation and all that was on his mind at that time was to get cover.

For hours, he remained trapped inside the wine shop, alone as the shooting raged on outside. His wife called and some friends insisted that he switches off his phone lest it rings and attracts attention of the gunmen. “I remember my wife calling and saying that from what she had heard, those were not good people. But all along I didn‘t think they were terrorists. My phone battery died before I decided to switch it off.”

He lost track of time and acted dead for what he thinks was more than 12 hours, until he was sure the situation was under control. „I decided to leave when calm ensued. I did not know what day or time it was. At this point, I decided I would rather die trying to escape than be found and killed doing nothing,“ Maina narrates.

Luckily for him, as he exited the wine shop trying to escape, he saw the police. He waved at them and the Nakumatt T-shirt he was wearing made it easier for police not to shoot at him.

But when he was asked to identify himself and police were searching him, they found a customer‘s ID on him.

“I was in shock and could not answer the questions asked by police. I could not speak. But it was later that I found my voice and explained how I got the ID. A customer was paying by card and he had given me his ID to verify when terrorists struck,“ he explains. In panic, he took off with the ID still in hand, and he had to keep it in his pockets after he lost the customer in the mayhem.

Six heavily armed policemen on either side then escorted him outside to safety, but they were yet to believe his story in full. They were taking him in for further interrogation when they met a Nakumatt manager who spotted him with the police and identified him as his member of staff.

But before he was released, police took him to a corner for further interrogation.

“ At this point in time, they wanted to know if I had seen the terrorists and how they looked like. I was then handed over to the first aid team who took over from there.”