[RADIOLAB INTRO]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: An upscale mall in Nairobi has turned into a battleground. Armed men stormed Westgate Mall in the Kenyan capital just before lunch time, firing weapons and throwing grenades. What appears to witnesses to be at least a dozen gunmen have taken hostages inside. Others have reported that the—there have been reports, there have been unsubstantiated reports. No, no. Let me not do those ones. Kenyan police and counter-terrorism officers are ...]

GREGORY WARNER: I almost feel like I need to start with a caveat that all these other stories that we've, you know, gotten to do together ...

JAD ABUMRAD: Mm-hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: ... have been me telling you a story as a journalist. I feel like this story, it's gonna be a story where I'm gonna have to stop being a journalist at some point.

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. Oh, I keep waiting for you to say, "The podcast." But we don't do that anymore.

ROBERT: Oh, we don't do that anymore.

JAD: That guy you just heard, that was NPR's East Africa correspondent Greg Warner, who's done a bunch of stories with us. Recently, he came to us with another one. It was all about a struggle he was having trying to figure out how to tell a story that is true. Let's leave it at that.

GREGORY WARNER: It's actually a story about the aftermath of an event that probably got more media coverage than almost any event in East Africa last year. That is the—the terrorist attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi. This was September 21, 2013. It was a kind of balmy Saturday afternoon. Westgate Shopping Mall, crowded with more than a thousand shoppers. Even more families than usual were there that day because there was a children's cooking competition. In fact, the kids were just setting up their ingredients and parents had just taken their seats when shortly after noon ...

[sound of gunfire]

GREGORY WARNER: ... gunmen entered the building shooting AK-47s, going floor to floor killing people. And the siege would last for four days.

[sound of gunfire]

GREGORY WARNER: Now for four days essentially, I and, you know, like, dozens of international and—and local journalists are outside the mall listening to the sounds of gunfire.

[sound of gunfire]

GREGORY WARNER: Trying to guess what's happening inside because the press is of course not allowed in while this battle is ongoing. Meanwhile, I'm getting on the air every hour sometimes, trying to just piece things together.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Once they were inside, they continued to shoot. I'm mentioning there's a plume of tear gas coming my way, so I'm gonna have to try not cough as I'm answering this—this question.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Scott Simon: Gregory, move as you need to move, by all means.]

GREGORY WARNER: But my point is that there was no information at the scene other than this gunfire. What there was were a whole bunch of survivors.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: How do you feel?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: You know, helpless. Helpless, yeah.]

GREGORY WARNER: In fact, all the journalists—myself included—were racing around interviewing eyewitnesses.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Everybody was. I mean, everybody was really running for their lives.]

GREGORY WARNER: Talking to them and also to Kenyan officials to get a picture of what happened. And the story that emerges from those interviews is basically this: that the number of terrorists inside that mall—or at least in the beginning—was 10 to 15 gunmen.

[NEWS CLIP: Between 10 and 15 gunmen.]

[NEWS CLIP: 10 to 15 attackers.]

[NEWS CLIP: Up to 15 armed militants was reported.]

GREGORY WARNER: But the profile is multi-ethnic.

[NEWS CLIP: Came from Kenya, the United Kingdom and, you know, Arab origins.]

GREGORY WARNER: This is like a rainbow coalition of Somalis, Kenyans, Arabs. Mostly men, but also including a British woman.

[NEWS CLIP: A young British woman they called "The white widow."]

GREGORY WARNER: Eyewitnesses—eyewitnesses on different floors of the mall all talking about "their" gunmen, the people they saw. And it's this multi-ethnic group. And then of course perhaps most alarmingly for those of us, you know, living in Nairobi, there was a report that at least one gunman had, after shooting some people, thrown away his gun and actually escaped with the fleeing shoppers. We hear that from a couple witnesses. So that's the initial story. But it's not really until eight weeks later, in November, that US officials invite about a dozen British and American journalists into a conference room in the US embassy and we meet an official there from the FBI. Now we had known that the FBI was involved in the postmortem analysis.

[NEWS CLIP: Forensic teams from the United States and Europe joined the investigation.]

GREGORY WARNER: Because this is like a global terrorism event, so Kenya had invited Scotland Yard and the FBI to figure out who these terrorists were. But the FBI had not actually said anything officially. And this meeting inside the US embassy was on what's called deep background, which isn't even off the record. It's—it's a deeper level of secrecy. We weren't at that time even allowed to say that a US official had said any of this stuff, this was just information for us to know. Since then, I can talk about this meeting because everything that was revealed there has now become part of the public record. In fact, the FBI has come out publicly and said all these things.

GREGORY WARNER: But at the time, this was new. And what the FBI person said at the time was that his team had access to all the closed-circuit camera footage. Remember, this is—this is a mall. It's a modern mall, so there's cameras everywhere. He's seen it from the beginning to the end of the attack from all those different perspectives, and that according to that footage everything that we had reported in those first few days was wrong.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: Wrong? Wrong in what way?

GREGORY WARNER: Well for instance, 10 to 15 terrorists? No, there weren't 10 to 15 terrorists. There were four.

ROBERT: Four. Huh.

GREGORY WARNER: They also said, "Okay, you've been reporting this—this multi-ethnic coalition of Arabs, Kenyans and Somalis that so many eyewitnesses told you. No, they're all Somalis. They're all Somali ethnicity, all four of them. And there's also no evidence that any of the gunmen escaped."

JAD: I'm just curious from his perspective, was he trying to—I don't know. What was your read on this meeting?

GREGORY WARNER: You know, I actually felt—and I know other people in that room felt a huge sense of relief because, you know, here we all are trying to do the work of journalism, you know, trying to get credible testimony, and suddenly here's a guy saying, "Okay, take away all that speculation, all those contradictory stories, all those different reports, here's some objective evidence. You can't see this tape because it's secret for various anti-terrorism reasons, but this is solid." And after that time ...

[NEWS CLIP: New details tonight about the ...]

GREGORY WARNER: ... everybody was reporting the same thing.

[NEWS CLIP: Unreleased surveillance video shows four armed assailants.]

[NEWS CLIP: Only four terrorists.]

GREGORY WARNER: Four terrorists.

[NEWS CLIP: Security cameras show four armed assailants.]

[NEWS CLIP: All four suspects are believed to be from Somalia.]

GREGORY WARNER: They're all Somalis.

[NEWS CLIP: They confirmed that all four were killed.]

GREGORY WARNER: And none escaped.

[NEWS CLIP: The attackers are now dead.]

GREGORY WARNER: So it kind of put a cap on all those conspiracy theories and speculations that were really filling the media.

ROBERT: You weren't the slightest bit curious about why—what might have been left out?

GREGORY WARNER: Well I mean, what I guess I really felt was—was sort of empty. Because I'm, you know, not only a reporter in Nairobi, I'm also a person living in Nairobi. I mean, I live here. You know, I go to dinner parties, I take my kid to birthday parties. And, you know, I remember especially then in the first months after Westgate there were so many people in that mall, invariably somebody would be there at the party who had their own survivor's story. And, you know, it's one thing to say, "Oh well, that was all this eyewitness testimony. You know, it's not accurate." But it's another thing to look into the eyes of somebody who's sitting there with a paper plate of cake in their hand telling you that the terrorists that they saw is not the terrorists that saw on this bit of footage that had been released and was playing on heavy rotation on Kenyan television.

ROBERT: Did that happen more than once?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, it happened much more than once. I mean ...

GREGORY WARNER: So I'm gonna use only your first name.

PUNI: You can say Puni, my nickname.

GREGORY WARNER: ... I'll give you an example. My friend Puni, former neighbor of mine in Nairobi. That Saturday morning she went into the Westgate Mall to get a present for her friend's daughter.

PUNI: I think it was a puzzle. A little puzzle for a four-year-old girl. And I'm standing there, I'm just about to pay, and then boom! Explosion.

GREGORY WARNER: Automatic weapons.

PUNI: Rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat. You know, they were shooting. You could hear the grenades.

GREGORY WARNER: She says she ran out of the store, passing a bunch of chairs and tables that had been set up for that cooking competition.

PUNI: I didn't have much time to think. I just ducked under one of those tables. And then it got quiet. You could hear people praying, muttering prayers.

GREGORY WARNER: She said she heard a man.

PUNI: Gasping for breath.

GREGORY WARNER: And she says at one point, another woman was under the table with her.

PUNI: Her and I were literally, yeah, squeezed together. She was pregnant.

GREGORY WARNER: She was pregnant?

PUNI: Yeah. And that's the first thing she said. She's like, "I'm pregnant and I'm shot." I didn't have the presence of mind to help her. She basically took one of those drapes and wrapped it around her leg to stop the bleeding. Later on—I mean, because we were there for quite some time she said to me, "I'm dying." And yeah, at that point I was stroking her hair saying, "No, you're not. You're fine. It's just your leg. It's just your leg."

GREGORY WARNER: And Puni says that while she was under that table she would try to peek up ...

PUNI: Through the cloth. And for the longest time I couldn't see anything. Finally, I see—I see the guys. Two—there was two young boys. Cute, little, young, innocent-looking boys. You know, yeah, it's hard to imagine. You can't reconcile what they're doing with how they look. One of them was—was kind of—I don't know, maybe a 17-, 18-year-old kid?

GREGORY WARNER: And cute?

PUNI: I don't know. It's just—I could just see him as being the son of one of my friends. This particular one who was closest to us was wearing a red t-shirt.

GREGORY WARNER: And here's where you get to a small but significant discrepancy that still haunts Puni. She says she is sure that the two guys she saw—and they're just a few feet away from her—were wearing short-sleeved shirts.

PUNI: And afterwards, I keep seeing these images of four guys, none of whom were wearing short sleeves. I mean, at the beginning if you remember they were saying there were 15 guys, so then it kind of made sense that well, the two guys that I saw were different from the four that we're seeing on TV.

GREGORY WARNER: But then when people like me started to report that there were only four ...

PUNI: Categorically only four guys. Then I started to say, "Wait. Wait a minute." I saw their arms. I know I saw short-sleeved t-shirts. You know, it just does not make sense. Nothing adds up. I start to think, am I crazy? Is my mind playing tricks on me? I think I saw one thing and then I didn't, but I'm quite sure I saw this. I mean, every day, every moment of the day you're thinking about what happened, what happened that day.

GREGORY WARNER: You know, at these parties I'd hear all of these stories like Puni's that weren't the official narrative. And yet it felt real. All the details seemed weird enough to be true, surreal enough to be true. You know, another person was talking about the—this powerful story where this man was shooting and then he got a phone call and stopped shooting long enough to answer the phone, and then hang up and start shooting again. I mean, it's like you don't make details like that up. And this is what I think made things so awkward in those conversations because they knew that the terrorist they saw was different than on the video, and what that left them with was two things. One is that I might think that they were lying. And that two, that the terrorist that haunts them is still out there.

PUNI: You know, that guy could just be around. He could see me again.

GREGORY WARNER: And here's where things get a little weird. Okay, so this is four months later, definitely the news cycle has kind of moved on. As a journalist I don't really have to report on Westgate anymore. It's Saturday afternoon again. I'm actually just at home with my kid. And ...

[phone rings]

GREGORY WARNER: ... I get a phone call.

JAD: It's a call that kind of upended the whole story for him. And that's after the break.

[LISTENER: This is Darlene, calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And we'll get back to Greg—reporter Greg Warner's story of the aftermath of the Westgate terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya. You just heard the beginning.

ROBERT: We're now gonna tell you the end—if there is an end.

JAD: Yeah. We'll pick things up with Greg getting a phone call ...

[phone rings]

GREGORY WARNER: I get a phone call.

JAD: ... from a guy we haven't met yet. A guy named Farooq. Now Farooq is not his real name. He asked Greg to change his name for the story. It'll become clear why a bit later.

GREGORY WARNER: Now Farooq ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Can you move further up please? Please? We're right in the line of fire here.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... Farooq is one of the first people I met in the parking lot on that first day of the attack.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Everybody was—I mean, I just heard gunfire, gunshots. And I was just—everybody was running away.]

GREGORY WARNER: When I met him, he was actually trying to reach his fiancée.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: She's stuck in there.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Still in there?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah. She's not picking up the phone. I've written a message, a message that "I'm okay. How are you?" But she's not responded yet. Even I lost my specs.]

GREGORY WARNER: He had lost his eyeglasses as he was fleeing, so ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Well, let me see. If you want me to look. What name are you looking for?]

GREGORY WARNER: ... I have to read it. He hadn't gotten a text from her.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I wrote her a message. There is no reply. Then I called her, no reply.]

ROBERT: What happened to her?

JAD: Was she killed?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, she was later found among the bodies at the morgue.

JAD: Oh, gosh.

GREGORY WARNER: But then a week later I met back up with Farooq, and he told me some things that he'd not told me that morning.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: From first floor, everybody was going to second floor.]

GREGORY WARNER: He says there was this moment in the mall. Utter panic where a bunch of people were running up the escalator, and one of the terrorists came down the opposite way, down the escalator.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And this guy was pushing everybody down with shootings.]

GREGORY WARNER: Somehow, Farooq says, he got spun around in the opposite direction of the crowd.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And then I saw him.]

GREGORY WARNER: He gets a good look at this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I saw the person very clearly. This person, he was an Arab guy.]

GREGORY WARNER: He says he's sure of it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yes.]

GREGORY WARNER: And then he says that he ran and found a hiding spot.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And after some time ...]

GREGORY WARNER: He pokes his head out and he saw him again.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: When I saw this guy, he was changing his clothes.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Changing what?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: He had clothes on him now, but he removed those clothes. Then he was wearing another clothes inside, under the clothes inside.]

GREGORY WARNER: Basically, he says that after that first part of the siege, the guy changed his clothes, dropped his gun and then insinuated himself into the crowd.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And when we came out, this guy joined us. He joined us. So then I saw him outside, and I was telling everybody, "He's one of them. He was one of them." But everybody was in shock. Nobody could see what I'm saying.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: And—and do you know what happened to him?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, I don't know. No idea.]

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, so ...

[phone rings]

GREGORY WARNER: ... back to that phone call in January that I was telling you about.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: Farooq, he calls me out of the blue. He says, "Hey, I'm sitting in a bar at a place called Diamond Plaza." Which is interesting because Diamond Plaza happens to be one of the prospective terrorist targets in Nairobi, a known terrorist target besides Westgate Mall. And he says across from him a few tables away is the fifth gunman, the guy who got away.

JAD: Whoa!

GREGORY WARNER: "I see him. He's at the next table." And he says, "Can you come?"

JAD: And you actually went?

GREGORY WARNER: Well, at first I told him, "You should just finish your beer and go home." I actually hung up. But then I thought I probably shouldn't blow this guy off. If this were happening in the United States, I could have just said to the guy, "Look, if you're so sure about this, why don't you just call 911?" But there is no 911 in—in Kenya. And so he called me. And I basically said to him, "Well, what do you want me to do?" And he said, "Just let the police know." And then I did. I called the—a source that I know in the police department, and he called his people, and they said, "Okay, we're gonna be right there. Where is his location?"

JAD: Hmm.

GREGORY WARNER: You know, they treated it seriously, so I took it seriously. Plus, there was this small but amazing possibility of this being an incredible scoop.

JAD: Yeah.

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, this is my plan, basically. I figure like, okay, I'm gonna wait downstairs until the police show up, and then, you know, COPS-style, I'm gonna race up with them and sort of be behind the police. So I'll be able to witness it but I'll be safe, right? But I get there and the police are, like, not there yet. So I'm waiting downstairs at this bar. Farooq's calling me, like, "Where are you, man?" And I say, "Well, I'm downstairs." And he's like, "Okay. Come up."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Come, come, come.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I don't know if I should go upstairs.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Come on, man!]

GREGORY WARNER: I'm like, "I don't think this is a good idea."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I'm gonna stay down here.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No! Come on! Come!]

GREGORY WARNER: And as I'm sitting there arguing with him he says, "We have to hurry because I've invited this guy, this supposed terrorist, to sit with me at my table."

JAD: What?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I've told him to sit with me.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: You told him to sit with you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah, yeah, yeah.]

GREGORY WARNER: I guess the guy was about to leave and Farooq didn't want him to leave, so he jumped up and somehow convinced this guy, this stranger, to sit and have a drink with him at the table.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And he's—he's really scared now.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: He's scared? Hold on. I think it's going to emerge soon that ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, it's okay. You come. You are a friend of mine.]

GREGORY WARNER: As I come up, I walk into this bar, past the pool table, and it's this out—outdoor bar. He brings me to the table, and ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And this is from Yemen.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Oh, from Yemen?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah, yeah, yeah.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... there's this guy.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No English, no Swahili.]

GREGORY WARNER: Late 20s, fairly slender. He was wearing a t-shirt, black jeans. One odd detail that stood out to me was that he was wearing two watches.

ROBERT: Really?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: What are you drinking?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Tusker. Tusker.]

GREGORY WARNER: So I sit down, order a beer, make up this terribly lame story about why I'm there.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I'm doing all right. I'm just getting a phone case for my wife.]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Were you able to talk to the guy?

GREGORY WARNER: Yeah, well the guy didn't speak English, so ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Do you like Nairobi?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, he doesn't—he doesn't know English.]

GREGORY WARNER: I did try to engage this guy in conversation. He didn't really understand what I was saying except for very basic stuff. But within a few minutes of my sitting down the police finally arrive.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, police officer: Warner?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Hello, officers. This is obvious for you.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Hi. Gregory.]

GREGORY WARNER: Right away, Farooq jumps up, IDs the guy who is completely confused about what's going on.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I saw him at Westgate.]

GREGORY WARNER: He claims that he was at the mall the day of the attack.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I told you my wife got three bullets.]

GREGORY WARNER: And so the police start to question the guy. And the interaction is—is very suspicious. They ask him where he's from. He says Nairobi, even though he had told us that he's from Yemen. And then they ask him for a passport, and then he says, "Oh, I don't have my passport." But then he does. So then he says, "Oh, I'm from Yemen." So—anyways, so that's enough for the police. They put the rubber handcuffs on him and they take him away.

JAD: Well, how did the guy react?

GREGORY WARNER: He didn't—he seemed kind of—well, he seemed high, actually. Something I hadn't mentioned was that the guy had been chewing a narcotic leaf, it's known as miraa or khat. And so he—he seemed, you know, like a scared, high person, you know? Where you're scared but you're kind of numb to everything that's happening. It all seems like a dream. I mean, this is, like, very conjectural but what was not conjectural was that as the police were leading him out, Farooq just loses it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: [inaudible] You kill my wife, and now you ...]

GREGORY WARNER: He says, "You killed my wife!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Mother [bleep]. [inaudible]]

GREGORY WARNER: "You mother [bleep]." He starts cursing at the guy, you know?

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: And I don't give a [bleep] anyway.]

GREGORY WARNER: And then he starts just shouting so that anyone at the bar can hear him.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: He's the person who was shooting. Him! Huh? He's the one!]

GREGORY WARNER: Like, it's all we could do to kind of calm him down.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I mentioned something four months back, didn't I? You know, my family's saying you are putting your life in risk. I said I don't have a life. I lost my life. I saw him and he was watching me! He shot my love, man. How can I let it go? This is the guy.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: You're sure?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: 110 percent!]

GREGORY WARNER: And that's when the call to prayer comes out of the speakers from a nearby mosque.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: This guy is the one.]

GREGORY WARNER: And Farooq ranted all the way through it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Right now. This is the guy.]

GREGORY WARNER: He then left directly from the bar to go to the police station to give his statement. And I—I felt really bad, actually. I'd never felt like I was doing something wrong per se, but I felt that harm had come to this person. And actually at that point I didn't feel that he was a terrorist, and I just hoped that the system to which I had helped commit him would treat him fairly.

GREGORY WARNER: After that, I kept calling the police station every few days. About 10 days later I found out the guy was released and he hadn't been charged with anything. And at that point I was like, "All right. Great. This all worked out fine. Poor guy was in the wrong place at the wrong time and, you know, got falsely ID-ed possibly, but look, everything is done. Everything kind of worked out the way it was supposed to. And that's what I assumed, you know, for months basically, and kind of like, went off to do other kinds of reporting other stories.

GREGORY WARNER: But a few months later I was talking to that police source again, and I happened to mention—we were talking about a different story, I said, "You know, whatever happened to that—to that guy from Yemen, that fellow that was picked up at Diamond Plaza?" And he said "Oh, you know, it's funny. The witness that you told us about ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, source: He didn't show up.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... he never showed up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: He didn't show up?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, source: He didn't show up. They called him for three consecutive days, but our man never showed up.]

GREGORY WARNER: I said, "What? Farooq never showed up to give his testimony?" Like, you can hear from the tape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: I'm going right now. This is the guy!]

GREGORY WARNER: The one thing that's so clear is that he's on his way over to the police station full barrels blazing. And so I called Farooq ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, recording: Sorry, the mobile subscriber cannot be reached.]

GREGORY WARNER: ... and his phone is off. And then I call him a week later, his phone is still off. It's giving this, like, "This phone number is no longer in service" kind of thing. So it's actually not until close to the year anniversary of the Westgate that I get a call.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Hello, man. You okay?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: Yeah, are you okay?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: Yeah.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Gregory Warner: I've been trying your number and it hasn't worked for weeks.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Farooq: No, I've just come back. I was out of the country]

GREGORY WARNER: And it's Farooq. And he's very nervous. He says, "Are you alone?" Asking me not to record this conversation, and he tells me he had gone to the police station. Just as I suspected, he marched right over to the police station. And they told him, "Oh, well, no. This is being handled by the anti-terrorism police. So you leave your phone number and the anti-terrorism police will give you a call. A week later he started getting calls, several calls from unknown numbers where people who did not identify themselves threatened him, told him not to say anything about this guy he had had arrested, not to talk to the press or he'd be sorry and his family would be sorry. He was extremely rattled by these phone calls, and ultimately actually turned off his phone. That's why I couldn't get a hold of him. Had left the country for a short bit, had come back and was laying very low. And that's why I'm using an assumed name for him. I'm not telling his full name because he doesn't want that.

JAD: And do you believe the stories about the threats, and ...

GREGORY WARNER: I have absolutely no way of knowing for sure. That part of his story, though, seemed the most likely to be true—the fact that the anti-terrorism police had called him allegedly and made threats, that does not sound strange unfortunately to me. I've heard that story from lots of very credible people.

ROBERT: Does this make what he saw truer or untrue? Or we don't ...

GREGORY WARNER: I don't know. Suddenly—suddenly I found myself less willing to discount the story. And I was less comfortable with the official narrative than I wanted to be at that point. So I called up one more guy, a guy who is not a government official, who is not the FBI, and yet who had seen all the videotapes from the mall.

DAN REED: Okay.

GREGORY WARNER: So can you just give me your name and your—and your title?

DAN REED: My name's Dan Reed. I'm a producer and director of documentaries, most recently Terror at the Mall, which was made for HBO and the BBC.

GREGORY WARNER: And for that documentary, Dan got exclusive access to all the surveillance footage inside that mall.

DAN REED: Right.

GREGORY WARNER: I figured if there were more to this story, he could tell me.

GREGORY WARNER: So how much footage did you get, if I can ask? I mean, how many hours, or ...

DAN REED: The footage we obtained added up to about more than 2,000 hours.

GREGORY WARNER: Wow.

DAN REED: And we analyzed the timeline, where the cameras were, and we figured out the offsets between different cameras. We really did a huge forensic job. It's mind-numbingly tedious to watch a lot of it, but if you do go through it you do get the key to a lot of the mysteries of Westgate.

GREGORY WARNER: Like me, he'd gone into this project open minded.

DAN REED: There were some very kind of, you know, sober, sensible people who said, "Yeah, there were seven terrorists. I saw seven terrorists." I mean, you dream of being able to confirm that there were seven gunmen. You dream of being able to confirm that they all escaped. What if that were true? What if we could find evidence, some evidence that that were true?

GREGORY WARNER: But in the end, he didn't.

DAN REED: No. As we progressed further and further with our forensic analysis it became harder and harder to give any credit to some of the wilder pieces of—of eyewitness.

GREGORY WARNER: He says what you see on those tapes is what the FBI said you'd see: four guys, all Somali, no evidence they escaped.

DAN REED: Exactly.

JAD: Well then how does he square the stories you were hearing with the stories you were reporting?

DAN REED: Well ...

GREGORY WARNER: That part was actually quite interesting.

DAN REED: ... we had a lot of people say yeah, there was a woman.

[NEWS CLIP: A young British woman they called "The white widow."]

DAN REED: And it's interesting because when I was going through this footage, my wife looked over my shoulder ...

GREGORY WARNER: Pointed to one of the four terrorists on the screen.

DAN REED: ... and at one point she said, "Oh, is that a girl?" And we came to the conclusion that one of the gunmen was, you know, very slender, and he actually does sashay along in what is frankly quite an effeminate way.

GREGORY WARNER: And similarly, he says, you can justify some of the reports that one of the gunmen was an Arab because one of them did, in fact, have lighter skin than your average Somali. And you can explain that people thought that there were more gunmen, 10 or 15 gunmen, because there were a lot of guys with guns running around, including security guards and later, policemen.

DAN REED: There were a lot more policemen than there were gunmen.

GREGORY WARNER: I did speak with one eyewitness who said that he saw one of the terrorists—[coughs] excuse me—change clothes and escape. Is that a story you heard about?

DAN REED: Well, no. That doesn't—that doesn't match anything that we saw. I think the thing to question your eyewitnesses is how do you know this person with a weapon who changed clothes was a terrorist? It may have been a policeman. We certainly heard stories of policemen taking off—changing clothes or taking off their—any distinctive clothing. I don't know if those stories were true, but we heard stories.

GREGORY WARNER: Oh, so people were saying that uniformed policemen took off their uniform because they didn't want to fight.

DAN REED: Yeah. I guess, yeah. But that's pure—Greg, that's pure—I mean ...

GREGORY WARNER: Right. Totally speculation. And your—and you did not see that on the—any of the security tape.

DAN REED: We certainly didn't. I mean, I've just had so many conversations, like, people saying to me, "No, they escaped." And I'm like, "Why do you think they escaped?" You know, these guys don't come to escape. If you escape, you fail.

GREGORY WARNER: He says take the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Terror in Mumbai: They had murdered 35 people at the hotel.]

GREGORY WARNER: This is another film that he made. There's a moment in that film where one of the gunmen, one of the last remaining gunmen ...

DAN REED: The guy is trapped in a hotel room, and he's next to—he's in a bathtub next to his comrade who's dead, who's dying.

GREGORY WARNER: ... he's talking to one of his handlers on the cell phone. Dan was able to get a recording of that call.

DAN REED: And the handlers very calmly say to him, "You know, your mission will not be a success until you are killed." And then they say to him, "Please leave your phone on, switched on. Leave the line open in your pocket so that we can hear when you go out and are killed by the enemy security forces." So there is a whole script for this kind of operation. And it ends with the death of the gunman at the hands of the enemy.

GREGORY WARNER: Wow.

GREGORY WARNER: That's how he knows they didn't escape, he says. Not just because there's no evidence on the film, but because it's the last thing they would've wanted. And yet ...

DAN REED: I mean, I—the rumors that the terrorists escaped, the rumors that there was a woman amongst them, the rumors that they got changed, the rumors they don't seem to go away even when confronted by quite solid evidence. It's almost as if the facts don't matter.

GREGORY WARNER: So I called Farooq. He's still sticking to his story. He says he saw what he saw, though he's really too nervous to go on tape. But I did run it by Puni, my former neighbor in Nairobi who's still pretty sure that the guy she saw in the mall hasn't been accounted for.

PUNI: I think I'm sure about it, but ...

GREGORY WARNER: What if the government said, "Here's the bodies, here's the DNA evidence, here's the four. They all died, they died on the second day or third day or whatever it was, this is how they died and here's the DNA proof."

PUNI: You know what would really make me happy is if they even asked the questions, be it the media, be it the government. Why did we go from 15 to four?

GREGORY WARNER: So I told her.

GREGORY WARNER: I can quickly tell you how we arrived at four.

GREGORY WARNER: I told her about the meeting with the FBI, and how we got this information. Then I told her about Dan Reed watching 2,000 hours of videotape. And I told her about how I investigated Farooq's story, and mostly came up empty. I told her not just everything that I know, all these facts, but how I got to them. Because in the end maybe the facts aren't enough. The facts need to make sense—especially for people who were there.

PUNI: But I can imagine for anybody who was not there, anybody who's reading it, yeah, the evidence says and then you move on.

GREGORY WARNER: Listening to you, I feel like I'm learning much more about my job and being a journalist. And maybe it's not so pretty because I feel like that day coming out of that meeting with the FBI and feeling like okay, now we have some solid evidence that can be reported and we can move on felt good. I mean, it felt like offering—instead of offering shaky testimony, we could offer truth, at least as best we could understand it. But it feels like maybe that was too sudden and too—too uninquisitive in a way to match the emotions that were still in the air in Nairobi at that time. Maybe it felt like abandonment even though it was meant to feel like clarity.

PUNI: Hmm. For me, it's still—there's a little glimmer of maybe that's not the full story. I—I'm inclined to believe that there were four, but then it's like what I saw does not make sense. And that I'll never be able to really reconcile, and I just kind of have to leave it at that.

JAD: A lot of people to thank for this story. Of course, Greg Warner first and foremost, NPR's East Africa correspondent. And also ...

ROBERT: Thanks very much to Jason Straziuso ...

JAD: ... blogger Robert Alai ...

ROBERT: ... Heidi Voigt, NPR international editor Didi Schanche ...

JAD: ... and senior international editor Edith Chapin for allowing us to borrow Greg on our show. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

 

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