One of the suspected masterminds of the Westgate terror attack narrowly escaped a police dragnet in Nairobi Monday afternoon.
Police say the man is a former senior officer in Somalia and has been training Al-Shabaab militants in the war-torn country.
He
has reportedly been living at Nairobi’s Majengo area and travelled to
Garissa immediately after the attack but later returned to the city.
“We
suspect he just went to deliver something since he only stayed there
for a day,” said one of the officers involved in the operation.
Police
say the suspect, who travels frequently, is good at covering his trail
and has processed several documents to aid his movement between Nairobi
and Garissa.
Yesterday, the suspect was trailed to the
city centre where he made a call to Mombasa and several others to some
people in Somalia, before dumping the phone at a parking lot next to
Jeevanjee Garden.
His movements were traced to Jamia mosque, Ngara and along Juja Road where detectives lost track of him.
A
joint operation, which included officers from the Anti-Terrorism Police
Unit (ATPU), the National Intelligence Service, Flying Squad and the
Special Crime Prevention Unit, extended late into the night on Monday
but the suspect had not been captured by late Monday night.
Operations
have also been intensified as it has become clear that at least two of
the attackers could have slipped out of the mall in the confusion, and
also due to the fact that the people leaving the mall were not
thoroughly screened.
ATPU boss Boniface Mwaniki said so far police have arrested around 40 suspects.
On Sunday, police also seized three suspects who had reportedly been hiding in a room at Pangani area.
The three were found in possession of five different passports, a laptop and a car. They are being questioned by ATPU officers.
Detectives
are also looking for at least eight suspects believed to have been
directly involved in the attack. Four of them were captured on the CCTV
footage at the mall.
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