Terror at the Mall

On September 21st, 2013 a group of four to five young men aged between eighteen to twenty three from a radical Somali outfit related to Al Qaeda known as Al Shabaab, stormed an upmarket mall in Kenya’s capital of Nairobi and went on a killing spree that left an estimated 71 people of different nationalities dead in its wake. The first responders included an armed businessman named Abdul Haji and several other plain-clothed cops who made the ultimate call not to wait for reinforcements but instead stormed into the Westgate mall with the aim of saving lives. We follow the heart-wrenching stories of the lucky survivors of this terrorist attack as they narrate the accounts of that Saturday afternoon. Some of them include women and children who lived to tell their stories. HBO also gives us the accounts of the first responders as we observe their performance thanks to the CCTV surveillance systems which the terror gang left intact. —Isaac