Norwegian cops on the spot over mall suspect
POLICE in Norway are facing questions over how they lost track of a Somalia-born immigrant identified as one of the Westgate
Shopping Mall suspects after it was claimed he had been under surveillance several years ago.
Hassan Abdi Dhuhulow, a 23-year old former high school student in the Norwegian
town of Larvik, south of Oslo, was identified by friends as one of the suspected
gunmen captured in new CCTV footage of last month’s atrocity.
More footage emerged this week showing Dhuhulow and four other gunmen casually killing shoppers at Westgate.
It is not yet clear whether Dhuhulow and four of his accomplices were killed in the
siege or managed to escape. Two charred bodies were pulled from the mall on Thursday , but it is not known if
one of them was his. Dhuhulow, a football loving Chelsea fan once pictured wearing the team’s strip, disappeared
from Norway after leaving high school in 2009 and is then believed to have joined al-Shabaab, the Somalian terrorist
group that carried out the Nairobi attack. It has now been claimed that Dhuhulow had been on the radar of the police services
in 2007 after posting on Somali internet forums. He was also arrested by the Somali authorities last year over the murder of a
radio journalist, but released due to a lack of evidence. Norwegian police said it had established “strong suspicions” its citizens were among the prepetrators of the Nairobi massacre after it sent an investigative unit to Kenya
last week.
Officials said that Dhuhulow had arrived in Norway from Somalia in 1999 with his father and five siblings after his mother was
killed in the country’s conflict. However, he apparently became disillusioned with western life and from 2006, began frequenting
Somali forums linked to Islamic radicals – often on school computers. “I used to look over his shoulder at
school and he was always on mysterious sites with languages I couldn’t understand,” said one former classmate. “One
day at school I asked him what the page was about and he replied it was a guide to
killing American soldiers.” Another former pupil said that he had
changed in his teens when he embraced religion and started wearing robes and a skull cap. He would take a prayer mat to school
to carry out his prayers.
“He gave a talk one day about Somalia to the class and I found it really alarming,” the pupil said. “It was all about how beautiful
Somalia was – there was nothing bad about the country.”
The Norwegian television channel, TV2, reported that the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) had begun tracking Dhuhulow’s
online activities from 2007.
“The man was under surveillance over time because of his internet activities and
his contacts,” its report said. After leaving Norway for Somalia in
2009, Dhuhulow is believed to have joined a small group of trained fighters chosen to carry out targeted killings of al-Shabaab’s
enemies. He allegedly had a reputation as an expert
marksman. Last year the Somali authorities arrested him on suspicion of assassinating Hassan Yusuf Absuge, a radio journalist,
in Mogadishu, but he was cleared. “There was no evidence to link Dhuhulow
to that killing, but we were aware that he was an important man among the Shabaab and he should have been watched,” said the source, who works alongside the Somali government.
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