On the morning of September 21, members of the East FM radio community were buzzing with excitement. The station was about to hold round two of Superchef Junior, a cooking competition for kids. The venue was the rooftop parking area of Westgate shopping mall, in the Kenyan capital city of Nairobi.
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It was the second weekend running that East FM, a Bollywood-influenced station that bills itself “Kenya’s premier Asian mix”, had run the competition. Around two dozen participants aged between eight and 16 were to compete for cash prizes. A similar event held the previous week drew a crowd of more than fifty participants, mostly children and their parents.
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East FM radio presenter Kamal Kaur was to host the event. “We are super excited!” she wrote on the station’s Facebook page that morning. Her son and daughter would also be there, along with a number of her colleagues.
Bubbly, popular TV personality Ruhila Adatia Sood was there, her stomach poking out in the last stages of pregnancy. Morning breakfast presenter Aleem Manji and his co-presenter wife Seema were there with their young daughter. Also present was 26-year-old Californian woman Elaine Dang, who was to be a judge, along with local chefs Shailender Singh and Karan Suri. Mitul Shah, an employee of the main sponsor, Bidco Oil, was on hand to represent his company.
Superchef Junior was supposed to start at 11am.
Across town, journalist Harleen Jabbal was running late. She had covered the first round of Superchef for The Star newspaper, and was hoping for a follow-up story. A former East FM host herself, she also was looking forward to seeing friends and familiar faces.
That morning, her car had been making “weird noises” so a mechanic came to look at it. It was nearly 12 by the time she was able to leave.Down at the mall, the competition was just getting started.
“By 12 o’clock I had reached the highway because I was on my way,” Harleen recounts to SBS over the phone, four days later. “And I received an SMS from a friend, and it said ‘There’s a bomb at Westgate’.”
The 32-year-old immediately called her friend back.
“All I can hear her saying is ‘Harleen, Harleen, don’t come. We are under attack. I don’t know what’s going on but please if you haven’t come, just don’t come’,” she said. “And I can hear heavy gunfire at the back.”
Like other East FM hosts, Aleem Manji was on hand to help supervise children as they chopped vegetables and prepared their meals. He would later tell a Kenyan TV crew the competition had been going for around 20 minutes when he heard an explosion.
His wife Seema said there was little panic at first.
“We heard a bang, which I understand is the grenade, the first one they threw,” she said. “We thought, this is Kenya, we hear bangs all the time.”
After the group heard another explosion, quick-thinking members of the East FM team rushed forward to switch off the gas cylinders. The sound of gunfire ripped through the Westgate rooftop area, Seema recalled, and some of the children present began to get scared.
“When the gunshots went off, we thought there must be robbers in one of the banks. When that happened we started getting everyone in one area and [to] lie low.”
Her husband picks up the story.
“We saw people running out of the mall towards us, and down a ramp. And then we heard gunshots from the direction of the ramp,” he added.
The group still believed they were bystanders to a robbery – but that was about to change.
Aleem remembers hearing a loud explosion and seeing a bright flash of white. A moment later, the vision in his left eye had gone. From his right eye, he could see two gunmen on the rooftop. One was wearing all black; the other was dressed in white.
The one wearing white clothing came over to the corner where many of the Superchef participants were huddling.
“He said ‘We can see you’ve got a lot of women and children here,’” recalled Aleem.
Hearing that, Aleem started pleading with the gunmen to spare the children. His East FM colleague Kamal Kaur also appealed to the militants not to harm the children. The reply they got was chilling.
“He turned and said, ‘you did not spare our women and children, why should we spare yours?’” said Aleem.
Then the terrorist dressed in black started shooting.
“They weren’t shooting to scare, they were shooting to kill. They aimed low at where the people were crouching, and they just opened fire,” Seema added.
Blood poured from Seema’s head, drenching the couple’s tiny daughter.
“She was soaked in blood and I didn’t know whether she had been shot, because she went quiet,” Seema said.
A bullet had grazed Seema’s skull, and would have gone through it, she believes, if her husband hadn’t pushed her out of its path.
Aleem, astonishingly, got up to talk to the gunmen.
“He asked if I was a Muslim, and I said that I am. He said, ‘Is this your woman?’, and I said yes. He said, ‘Ask her to cover up’. Then he pointed to the gun and said ‘Leave’.”
The family left, departing down the ramp where they met reserve soldiers who organised an ambulance.
Exactly what happened next is still unclear, but no one who had been on the rooftop that day would ever be the same.
Kamal Kaur, the brave radio host who appealed to the gunmen to spare children, and others were able to leave through the service door of a coffee shop that was also on the roof of Westgate. Later, she recalled the events on Facebook.
“My kids and I received counselling today,” she wrote, a day after the incident. “We will need a lot more sessions. Both kids are hurt, bruised, battered & the shock is now sinking in. They still have a lot of shrapnel embedded, especially my daughter. I’m injured as well but it’s torn tendons from helping the kids climb over the wall.”
She urged Nairobi locals to donate blood to help the victims.
"Please save lives," she wrote. "There were children everywhere."
The presenter later added on Twitter that a little boy died by her side, and she lost track of her own children in the chaos. A picture of Kamal’s daughter, her leg bloodied and twisted, would appear on the New York Times.
Kamal’s East FM colleague Ruhila Adatia Sood was not so lucky. She was just two months away from giving birth to her first child.
She was shot in the chaos that engulfed the rooftop, and bled to death. Countless tributes to Ruhali have emerged on social media sites. One Facebook page created the day she died amassed more than 40,000 followers in less than a week.
Above: An image posted to Ruhali's Instagram account shortly before she died.Elaine Dang, the Californian woman, was photographed being escorted from the mall with blood pouring down her face. She’d later tweet from her hospital bed that she was recovering, surrounded by friends.
Both chef judges Shailender Singh and Karan Suri survived. “The gunmen fired indiscriminately at kids, mothers & threw grenades,” Karan Suri tweeted. “I am hurt but safe,” wrote Shailender Singh on his account.
Bidco Oil employee Mitul Shah was killed. Harleen Jabbal remembers him as a “wonderful guy”. “He’d come to see his competition [and] to encourage the participants, he didn’t make it,” she said.
After the initial attack, Bidco Oil updated its company Facebook page. “The Bidco Family remembers our dear Mitul Shah… who succumbed trying to rescue the children,” the note read.
Harleen, who never made it to Westgate on September 21, is both saddened and shaken by the event. She sees it as an odd twist of fate that car trouble stopped her from being at the mall that day.
“I feel lucky and at the same time I haven’t been able to sleep much because I hang out so much there,” she said. “It wasn’t meant to be, for me to be there that day.”
The Al Qaida-linked Somali militant group Al Shabab has claimed responsibility for the attack, which left around 70 people dead and several hundred injured, but little is known about the individual attackers.
By some accounts, they targeted foreigners and let Muslims go free, but those who survived the carnage downplay the role of religion in the day’s events.
“This is not about religion,” said Aleem Manji. “Ruhila, my co-host, was a Muslim, she was seven months pregnant. She died. She bled to death” “If you ever think for a minute that those people represent us, they don’t.
They never will. Please don’t let them win by thinking it.” Two days after they escaped the attack at Westgate mall, Aleem and Seema were back on air at East FM, broadcasting their message of peace to listeners.
