2013 Nairobi shopping mall attack

The 2013 Nairobi shopping mall attack was a premeditated killing of customers at the 5-storey Westgate shopping mall, located in Nairobi, Kenya, by members of the Somali Islamist militia al-Shabaab. The attack was carried out on Saturday 21 October 2013, by at least a dozen members, which reportedly included a woman wanted by police in the United Kingdom, Muslim convert Samantha Lewthwaite (dubbed by the media as 'The White Widow'), over the planned killing of British tourists in Mombasa in 2005. Al-Shabaab has claimed the attack was in response to Kenya's 2011 involvement in the multinational Operation Linda Nchi to oust al-Qaeda backed militants from south and central Somalia after a series of kidnapping of foreign tourists and aid workers inside Kenya.

At noon, masked Al-Shabaab gunmen entered the building's cafe forecourt which was hosting a children's day event. They threw grenades and fired on non-Muslims with assault rifles after separating them from Muslims, and ordering that group to leave. Dozens of customers were taken hostage as Kenyan police arrived, and at least 68 people were killed and 205 wounded during the siege. Those killed included the nephew of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta, Mbugua Mwangi and his fiancee Rosemary Wahito; Ghanaian poet and writer Kofi Awoonor; Kenyan media personality Ruhila Adatia-Sood; Canadian diplomat Annemarie Desloges; former senior director at UNICEF Juan Jesús Ortiz; prize winning British-Australian architect Ross Langdon and his partner Elif Yavuz, a health advisor for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.