A Norwegian citizen of Somali origin is suspected of being one of the attackers who stormed a Kenyan shopping mall last month massacring 67 people, the BBC said yesterday.
The 23-year-old was named as Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, who the BBC said is suspected of helping to plan and carry out the attack on the upmarket Westgate mall.
Dhuhulow was born in Somalia, but he and his family moved to Norway as refugees in 1999, according to relatives who spoke to the BBC from the Norwegian town of Larvik, 120km south of the capital, Oslo.
The BBC quoted one of Dhuhulow’s former neighbors Morten Henriksen, who described the young man.
“He was pretty extreme, didn’t like life in Norway ... got into trouble, fights, his father was worried,” Henriksen told the BBC, speaking of Dhuhulow as a teenager.
Last week Norway’s PST intelligence agency said it had launched a probe after it obtained information about the possible involvement of a Norwegian of Somali origin in both planning and carrying out the attack.
Norwegian investigators have been sent to Nairobi to work with their Kenyan counterparts, Norway’s PST said.
Witnesses in the mall described how the fighters stormed the complex at about midday on Sept. 21 when it was crowded with shoppers, firing from the hip and hurling grenades at shoppers and staff.
The gunmen coldly executed scores of people, with witnesses recounting how in some cases they called out to those wounded, then finished them off at close range.
The seige was declared over four days later.
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