The Tuesday terror attack on Dusit D2 Hotel began with a suicide bombing of one of the terrorists outside the Secret Garden Hotel before the remaining team took advantage of the confusion to advance into the building.
The police have since identified the suicide bomber as 25-year old Mahir Khalid Riziki, a Kenyan national with his roots in Majengo, Mombasa county.
Police reports say that the latter was radicalized at the Musa Mosque in Mombasa and had by 2014 been deployed among other youth to kill security personnel in the area.
In October 2014, he was listed among wanted persons in the region after involvement in the murder of a police officer at Royal Court Hotel, leading to his escape to Tanzania in November.
Between 2015 and 2018 he was in close contact with his family which he had since notified that he was training with the Alshabaab group and sneaked back into Kenya in January 13 in preparation for the attack.
He moved to Kiambu's Muchatha Estate to link up with the group commander Ali Salim Gichunge to receive instructions on how he was to operate on the main day, reports the Standard.
The latter is believed to be the one whose body parts were blown metres away after the explosion before his four colleagues came in, shooting indiscriminately.
The four would on early Tuesday be eliminated by commandos from the elite Recce squad on the seventh floor of the hotel, but not after they killed 21 innocent people.
Over 700 people were rescued from the siege by a combination of police, armed civilians and the Kenya Red Cross.