Radiolab - Outside Westgate

Episode Date: November 29, 2014

In the wake of public tragedy there is a space between the official narrative and the stories of the people who experienced it. Today, we crawl inside that space and question the role of journalists in helping us move on from a traumatic event.  NPR's East Africa correspondent Gregory Warner takes us back to the 2013 terrorist attacks on the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Warner reported on the attack as it happened, listening to eyewitness accounts, sorting out the facts, establishing the truth. But he's been been wrestling with it ever since as his friends and neighbors try not only to put their lives back together, but also try to piece together what really happened that day. Special thanks to Jason Straziuso, Heidi Vogt, Robert Alai, Didi Schanche and Edith Chapin.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W-N-Y-C. See? Yeah.

And NPR. An upscale mall in Nairobi has turned into a battleground. Armed men stormed Westgate Mall in the Kenyan capital just before lunchtime, firing weapons and throwing grenades. What appears to witnesses to be at least a dozen gun. 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... 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. There's been frequent gunfire... have been me telling you a story as a journalist. I feel like this story, it's going to be a story where I'm going to have to stop being a journalist at some point.

Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab. Oh, I keep waiting for you to say the podcast, but we don't do that anymore. Oh, we don't say that anymore. The 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.

I'll just leave it to that. 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, and that is the terrorist attack on Westgate Mall in Nairobi. This was September 21st, 2013. It was a kind of bomby Saturday afternoon. Westgate shopping mall crowded with more than 1,000 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. Parents had just taken their seats when shortly afternoon, Gunmen entered the building, shooting AK-47s, going floor to floor, killing people, and the siege would last for four days. Now, for four days, essentially, I and, you know, like dozens of international and local journalists are outside the mall, listening to the sounds of gunfire.

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. Once they were inside, they continued to shoot. I'm mentioning, there's a plume of tear gas coming my way, so I'm going to have to try not to cough as I'm answering this question. Gregory, move is you need to move, by all me. 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. How do you feel?

You know, helpless. In fact, all the journalists, myself included, were racing around interviewing eyewitnesses. Everybody was, I mean, everybody was really running for their lives. 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. Between 10 and 15 gunmen. 10 to 15 attackers.

Up to 15 armed militants. The profile is multi-ethnic. It came from Kenya, the United Kingdom and you know Arab origin. This is like a rainbow coalition of Somalis, Kenyans, Arabs, mostly men, but also including a British woman. A young British woman, they call the white widow. Eyewitnesses. eyewitnesses on different floors in 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 living in Nairobi, there's reports 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 U.S. officials invite about a dozen British and American journalists into a conference room in the U.S. embassy, and we meet an official there from the FBI.

Now, we had known that the FBI was involved in the post-mortem analysis. Forensic teams from the United States and Europe joined the investigation. 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 U.S. Embassy was on what's called deep background, which isn't even off the record. It's a deeper level of secrecy.

We weren't at that time even allowed to say that a U.S. 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 a part of the public record. And in fact, the FBI has come out publicly and said all these things. 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 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. Wrong. Wrong in what way? Well, for instance, 10 to 15, terrorist. No, there weren't 10 to 15 terrorists.

There were four. Four. They also said, okay, you've been reporting 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 was also no evidence than any of the gunmen escaped. I'm just curious from his perspective, where is he trying to... I don't know.

What was your read on this meeting? 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,

everybody was reporting the same thing. Unreleased surveillance video shows four armed assailants. Only four terrorists. They're four terrorists. Security cameras show four armed assailants. All four suspects are believed to be from Somali. They're all Somalis. So confirmed that all four were killed.

And none escaped. Attack is unout dead. So it kind of put a cap on all those conspiracy theories and speculations that were really filling the media. You weren't the slightest bit curious. I'm curious about what might have been left out? Well, I mean, what I guess I really felt was sort of empty because I'm not only a reporter in Nairobi,

or 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, where so many people in that mall, invariably somebody would be there at the party who had their own survivor 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 paperplate of cake in their hand telling you that the terrorist that they saw is not the terrorist that they saw on this bit of footage that had been released and was playing on heavy rotation on Kenyon television. Did that happen more than once? Yeah, it happened much more than once. I mean...

You want me to use only your first name. You can say puny, my nickname. I'll give an example, my friend Poonie, former neighbor of mine in Nairobi. That's Saturday morning, she went into the Westgate Mall to get a present for her friend's daughter. 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. Automatic weapons. You know, they were shooting. You could hear the grenades. She says she ran out of the store,

passing a bunch of chairs and tables that had been set up for that cooking competition. 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. She said she heard a man. Gasping for breath.

And she says at one point, another woman was under the table with her. Her and I were literally, yeah, squeezed together. She was pregnant. She was pregnant? 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 mine 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.

And Puni says that while she was under that table, She would try to peek up. Through the cloth and for the longest time I couldn't see anything. Finally, I see the guys. 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 kind of, I don't know, maybe a 17, 18-year-old kid. And cute? I mean, he'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. And here's where you get to a small but significant discrepancy that still haunts Poonie. She says she is sure that the two guys she saw, and they're just a few feet away from her, were wearing short-sleeve shirts. And afterwards, keep seeing these images of four guys, none of whom were wearing short-slee.

I mean, at the beginning, if you remember, they were saying they 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. But then when people like me started to report that they were only four. Categorically only four guys. Then I started to say, wait, wait a minute. I saw their arms. I know I saw short sleeve t-shirts. You know, it just does not make sense. Nothing adds up. You 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? You know, at these parties, I would hear all of these stories like Poonies 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 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 at those conversations because they knew that the terrorist they saw was different than on the video.

And what that left them 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. You know, that guy could just be around. He could see me again. 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 I get a phone call. It's a call that kind of upended the whole story. story for him. And that's after the break. This is Darlene calling from Kampala, Uganda. Radio Lab 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. Hey, I'm Chad Aboomerad. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab, and we'll get back to Greg, uh, reporter Greg Warner's story of the aftermath of the West Escape a terror attack in Nairobi, Kenya. You just heard the beginning. We're now going to tell you the end if there is an end. Yeah, we'll pick things up with Greg getting a phone call. I get a phone call.

From a guy we haven't met yet, a guy named Farouk. Now, Farouk is not his real name. He asked Greg to change his name for the story. It'll become clear why and a bit later. And now, Farooke. Can we move? Can we go further up, please? Sure. Because we're right in the line of park, by you.

Farooke is one of the first people I met in the parking lot on that first day of the attack. Everybody was, I mean, I just heard gunshots, and I was just, everybody was running away. When I met him, he was actually trying to reach his fiance. She's stuck in there. Still in there. Yeah. She's not picking the phone.

I've even written the message. I wrote the message that I'm okay, how are you? But she's not responded yet. Even I lost my specs. He had lost his eyeglasses as he was fleeing, so. Let me see if you want me to look. What name are you looking for? I had to read and he hadn't gotten to text from her.

I wrote her message is no reply. Then I called her, no reply. What happened to her? Was she killed? Yeah, she was later found among the bodies at the morgue. Oh, gosh. But then, a week later, I met back up with Farouk. And he told me some things that he had not told me that morning.

From first floor, everybody was going to second floor. 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. And this guy was pushing everybody down with shootings. Somehow, Ferrug says, he got spun around in the opposite direction of the crowd. And then I saw him.

He gets a good look at this guy. I saw the person very clearly. This person, he was an Arab guy. He says he's sure of it. Yes. And then he says that he ran and found a hiding spot. And after some time, he pokes his head out, And he saw him again.

When I saw this guy, he was changing his clothes. He had clothes on him, no? But he removed those clothes. Then he was wearing another clothes inside. Another clothes inside. 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.

And when we came out, this guy joined us. He joined us. So when I saw him outside, and I was telling him, everybody, he's one of them, he was one of them, but everybody was in shock. Nobody could say what I'm saying. And do you know what happened to him? No, I don't know. No idea.

Okay, so back to that phone call in January that I was telling you about. Farouk, he calls me out of the blue. He says, hey, I'm sitting at 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 West Cape Mall, and he says across from him, a few tables away, is the fifth gunman, the guy who got away. Whoa. I see him. He's at the next table.

And he says, can you come? And you actually went? 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 Kenya. And so he called me. And I basically said to him, what do you want me to do? And he said, just let the police know. And then I did. I called a source that I know in the police department,

and he called his people. And they said, okay, we're going to be right there. Where's his location? 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. Okay, this is my planet basically. I figured like, okay, I'm going to wait downstairs until the police show up and then, you know,

cops style, I'm going to 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 to this bar. Faruq is calling me like, where are you, man? and I say, well, I'm downstairs. And he's like, okay, come up. Come on, come on, come on.

Don't stay. What are you scared? I don't think I should go upstairs. Come on. I'm like, I don't think this is a good idea. Stay down here. No, come on. You're in the life.

Sit down. And as I'm sitting there arguing with him, he says, we have to hurry because I've invited this guy, this, but suppose a terrorist, to sit with me at my table. What? He told him sit with me. You told him to sit with you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess the guy was about to leave, and Farouk 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. And he's really scared, man. He's scared.

Hold on, what is that? Don't get, man. I think it's going to alert you that if it's a white guy. No, it's okay, even though the OSCE is here. Let's go. But? You come, you are a friend of mine. So I come up, I walk into this bar, past the pool table,

into this outdoor bar. We bring to the table and... And this is from Yemen. Oh, from Yemen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's this guy. 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. Really? What are you taking? So I sit down, order a beer, make up this terribly lame story about why I'm there. I mean, all right, I was just getting a phone case from my wife. Were you able to talk to the guy? Yeah, well the guy didn't speak English. So...

Do you like Nairobi? No, he doesn't know English. 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 am I sitting down the police finally arrived. Hi, Gregory. Right away, Farouk jumps up.

ID's the guy who is completely confused about what's going on. That's what you said. Explaining that he was at the mall, the day of the attack. I told you know, my wife got three bullets. And so the police start to question the guy. And the interaction 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. And then he says, oh, I'm from Yemen. So anyway, so that's enough for the police. They put the rubber handcuffs on him and they take him away. Well, how did the guy react?

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 called Mirrah or Kat. And so he seemed, you know, like a scared high person, you know, where you're scared, but you're kind of numb to what everything is 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, Farouk just loses it. You want to kill me, kill me, but you kill my wife. Now you want to kill me. He says, you can.

kill my wife. My f***. You motherfucker. And he starts cursing at the guy, you know. And I don't give a sh** on anyone. And then he starts just shouting so that anyone at the bar can hear him. He's the person who was shooting. Him, he's the one.

Like it's all we could do to kind of calm him down. I mentioned something four months back, didn't I? You know my family is saying, you are putting your life in risk. I said, I know, you know, I lost my life. So why should I care? I saw him and he was watching me.

He shot my love, man. How can I let it go? This is the guy. You're sure. Under 10%. And that's when the call to prayer comes out of the speakers from a nearby mosque. This guy is the one. And Farouk ranted all the way through.

He then left directly from the bar to go to the police station to give his statement. And I felt really bad, actually. I 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. 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 got falsely IDed 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 report. other stories. 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, yeah, whatever happened 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. He didn't show up. He never showed up. He didn't show up. They called him for three consecutive days, but a man never showed up. I said, what? Farouk never showed up to give his testimony.

Like, you can hear from the tape. I'm going right now. 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 call Farouk and his phone is off. And then I call him a week later.

His phone is still off. It's giving me 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 Westgate that I get a call. Yeah, are you okay?

Yeah, are you okay? I've been trying your number, and it hasn't worked for weeks. No, I'm just going to go back. And it's Farooke, 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. 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 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. Well, I'm not telling his full name because he doesn't want that. And do you believe the story is about the threats? 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 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. Does this make what he saw truer or untrue?

I don't know. 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. Okay. So can you just give me your name and your title?

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. And for that documentary, Dan got exclusive access to all the surveillance footage inside that more. Right. I figured if there were more to this story, he could tell me. So how much footage did you get, if I can ask? I mean, how many hours are out there? The footage we obtained added up to about more than 2,000 hours. Wow. 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. Like me, he had gone into this project, open-minded. There was 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 escape. What if that were true? What if we could find evidence, some evidence, that that were true?

But in the end, he didn't. No. As we progress further and further, with our forensic analysis, it became harder and harder to give any credit to some of the wilder pieces of eyewitness. He says what you see on those tapes is what the FBI said you'd see. Four guys, all Somali, no evidence they escaped. Exactly.

Well, then how does he square the stories you were hearing with the stories you were reporting? Well, uh... That part was actually quite interesting. We had a lot of people say, yeah, there was a woman. Young British woman, they called the white widow. And it's interesting because when I was going through this footage, my wife... looked over my shoulder. Pointed to one of the four terrorists on the screen.

And at one point she said, oh, is that a girl? And he 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. 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 they were more gunmen, 10 or 15 gunmen, because there were a lot of guys with guns running around, including security guards and later policemen.

There were a lot more policemen than there were gunmen. I did speak with one eyewitness who said that he saw one of the terrorists, excuse me, changed clothes and escape. Well, is it a story you heard of all? No, that doesn't match anything that we saw. I think the question to ask your eyewitness 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 any distinctive clothing. I don't know if those stories were true, but we heard stories. Oh, so people were saying that uniform policemen took off their uniform because they didn't want to fight. I guess, yeah. I mean, but that's pure, Greg, that's pure. I mean, there isn't a lot of detail. And you're, and you did not see that on the any of the security. 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. He says, take the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai. They had murdered 35 people at the hotel. 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.

The guy is trapped in a hotel room and he's next to, he's in the bathtub, next to his comrade who's dead, who's dying. He's talking to one of his handlers on the cell phone. Dan was able to get a recording of that call. 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, switch 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. Wow. 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 have wanted. And yet...

I mean, the rumors that the terrorists escape, 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. So I called Farouk. 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 Pune, my former neighbor in Nairobi, who's still pretty sure that the guy she saw in the mall

hasn't been accounted for. I think I'm sure about it, but... What if the government said, here's the bodies, here's the DNA evidence, here's the four. They all died, they died in the second day or third day or whatever it was. This is how they died, and here's the DNA proof.

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 4? So I told her. I quickly tell you how we arrived at four. 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 are there. But I can imagine for anybody who was not there, anybody who's reading it, yeah, the evidence says, and then you move on. You know, listen 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 as testimony, we could offer truth, at least as best we could understand it. But it feels like maybe that was too sudden and 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. for me it's still there's a little glimmer of maybe that's not the full story I'm inclined to believe that they 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 a lot of people to thank for this story of course Greg Warner first and foremost NPR's East Africa correspondent. And also... Thanks very much to Jason Strazu. Blogger Robert Alley. Heidi Vote. NPR International Editor Didi Skanky.

And Senior International Editor Edith Chapin for allowing us to borrow Greg on our show. I'm Jed I'm Um-Jad I'm Robert Krollwich. Thanks for listening.