Officers attached to the elite Recce Squad struggled to bring down the lead attacker in the DusitD2 terror attack on Tuesday, fresh details have emerged.
For close to 17 hours, the officers strained to shoot the commander who reportedly seemed well conversant with the environment around the hotel and who had taken refugee in one of the rooms believed to have been booked by them earlier.
"It took us very long to break into the room because the armoured door was very difficult to break. When we finally did, the commander, who was the last person to be killed, had so many grenades and rounds of ammunition in the room,” said a senior police officer who was part of the operation.
Investigators are now probing the possibility that hotel employees could have facilitated the attackers before Tuesday. While some of the grenades and rounds of ammunition were on the floor, many more were found in different drawers wrapped up in hotel laundry bags.
Police believe the deadly weapons, several rounds of magazines and bombs, may have been brought into the hotel earlier.
“We suspect an inside job considering these people had been frequenting the place as they schemed the attack,” said another officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not the official police spokesperson.
The officers who battled the terrorists said their commander was well trained and seemed to understand the hotel very well.
According to the officers, the fact that he had many grenades and ammunition, his high military training skills and bulletproof room, they had to retreat and strategise on how to bring him down.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, in his press conference, said that all terrorists had been eliminated during the operation in which 21 people died. The suicide bomber has been identified as Khalid Riziki from Mombasa while the commander is believed to have been a mechanic who operated in Wajir.
One of top suspect who is believed to have been killed, one Ali Salim Gichunge, is said to have hosted a number of assailants at his Ruaka home. His wife, Violet Kemunto, is believed to have sneaked to Somalia.