Westgate shopping mall attack
Terrorist attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya on 21 September 2013
On 21 September 2013, four gunmen attacked the Westgate shopping mall, an upmarket mall in Nairobi, Kenya. There are conflicting reports about the number killed in the attack, since part of the mall collapsed due to a fire that started during the siege. The attack resulted in 71 total deaths, including 62 civilians, five Kenyan soldiers, and all four gunmen. Approximately 200 people were wounded in the attack.
The militant Islamist group al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the incident, which it characterised as retribution for the Kenyan military's deployment in the group's home country of Somalia following Operation Linda Nchi from 2011 to 2012.
Kenyan authorities arrested dozens of people in the aftermath of the attack, but had not announced any suspects directly related to the siege. On 4 November 2013, a Kenyan court charged four Somali nationals with harbouring the gunmen in their homes, with each pleading not guilty.
On 20 September 2015, Foreign Policy magazine reported the Westgate attack lasted several hours, with the last victim killed before special Kenyan security forces entered the mall. The mall was officially declared secured on 24 September.
Background
The incident followed threats from Al-Shabaab in late 2011 of attacks in Kenya in retaliation for Operation Linda Nchi, a coordinated military operation in southern Somalia that was launched against the group by the Somali Armed Forces and Kenya Defence Forces.
“Westgate shopping mall attack” enters the record as terrorist attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya on 21 September 2013. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Westgate, shopping and mall can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14941568. Authority coordinates are -1.257, 36.803. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2013, 2011, 2012 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Westgate shopping mall attack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.