REVEALED: This is how Westgate Mall will be protected. Feel safe to shop there again

Westgate shopping mall is set to become a fortress after its owners enlisted an Israeli security firm to provide security at the up-market mall.

The security firm, I.R.G, will use about 25 of its specialist staff and about 55 guards from security firm G4S, Reuters has reported, quoting one employee of the security firm.

Reuters reports that the firm has installed new security features including explosive detectors, luggage X-rays, scanners to check underneath cars, bollards to prevent car bombs, and bullet-proof guard towers.

Owners of Kenya’s Westgate mall, closed after Al-Shabaab attackers massacred 67 people in September 2013, on Tuesday vowed it would be safe to visit.

The mall was badly damaged in the four-day siege in September 2013, when four gunmen walked into the upmarket mall, tossing grenades and killing shoppers and staff.

On Tuesday, painters were putting finishing touches to the inside of the mall, which is to set to reopen on Saturday.

In the mall’s main hall, where shoppers once played dead as gunmen stalked the corridors killing those they found, the stores appeared back to normal, missing only the shoppers that owners hope will return.

“Exactly 22 months ago we had one of the saddest days in Kenyan history,” Nairobi governor Evans Kidero told reporters outside the building, once one of the Kenyan capital’s most prestigious shopping locations.

“As a nation we cried, we mourned but… Westgate is back.”

The rear of the mall, once a multi-storey car park with a flat rooftop where gunmen shot shoppers at a children’s cooking competition, collapsed following a fierce blaze started by the fighting. That section was not open Tuesday.

Atul Shah, wh

o heads the main regional supermarket chain Nakumatt – whose store in the mall was where many of the victims were hunted down in aisles and killed – said they were ready to reopen.

“Nakumatt is back, and so are the other tenants who were here previously — and a few new ones,” Shah told journalists who visited the mall Tuesday, promising the “majority” will open business on Saturday.

See full details at :http://nairobinews.co.ke/revealed-details-of-how-the-new-westgate-will-be-protected/

SOURCE: Nairobi News