People hid behind boxes, barricaded kitchen doors with fridges, dragged children into dental clinics, and even confronted the attackers unarmed.

The stories of witnesses have caught the attention of the world’s media. Channel 4 News has collected 10 stories of people who survived.

‘They were very young but had no mercy’

Right at the start of the atrocity, Frank Musungu, an army officer shopping in Westgate, saw the attackers enter the building, as he told Kenyan paper the Nation. Mr Musungu also reports what several other eye-witnesses did – that he thought one of the attackers was a woman.

“They were not shooting to kill, they were shooting into the air to scare us away. I first thought that it was an ordinary robbery,” Mr Musungu said.

The officer said his attempt to negotiate with the assailants bore no fruit. “They did not listen to me, they were not talking, they were just shooting in the air,” he said.

An officer who was with Mr Musungu was shot after they identified themselves as officers. “He was shot and dropped his gun. I managed to carry him with me as I rushed him to an ambulance outside,” Mr Musungu said.

Mr Musungu described the assailants as heartless people who shot aimlessly. “One of them wrapped a white turban on his head. They were very young and the woman appeared to be lethal,” he added.

“They were very young but had no mercy.”

Child freed after calling attacker ‘bad man’

In one of the most surprising stories from the massacre, one attacker let a child go after the child said he was a bad man. The gunman reportedly handed him a Mars bar before letting him, his mother, Amber and several other children leave the building. As reported by the Sun and the Mail.

Amber told of her family’s terrifying escape from the al-Shabaab militants. The film producer had been queuing to buy milk in Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre when the militants struck.

She hid under a cold meat counter in the Nakumatt supermarket for an hour and a half with her children beneath her, before the militants finally found them and shot her in the thigh.

The children’s uncle told the Sun: “They had a lucky escape. The terrorists said if any of the kids were alive in the supermarket they could leave. Their mother made the decision to stand up and say ‘yes’.

“My nephew started arguing with them and called them bad men. He was very brave.”

After discovering the advertising producer was of French origin, the men began to plead with her and claimed that the Muslim faith “was not a bad one”. “He told me I had to change my religion to Islam and said ‘do you forgive us? Do you forgive us?’,” the mother told the Independent.

“Naturally, I was going to say whatever they wanted and they let us go.” Bizarrely, the al-Shabaab attackers handed the children Mars bars before they fled with two other children, including a 12-year-old boy who had at first refused to leave his dead mother. The fate of 20 others who had taken refuge under the meat counter is unknown.

‘I ran back into the mall to save my father’

Suveer Sachdeva was not in the mall when guns started going off. But he ran back in as he heard the explosions to find his father. He told Alex Thomson what happened.

I was washing blood out of my hair

Kamal Kaur was inside the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi when al-Shabaab militants struck. He tells Channel 4 News how attackers shot at children, including one boy right next to her, and how her pregnant friend was killed.

‘Throwing grenades like maize for chickens’

A journalist interviewing people coming out of the mall, heard how the gunmen threw grenades indiscriminately.

Bloodstained witness at #westgate in Nairobi tells me ‘they were throwing grenades like maize for chickens’

2 eyewitnesses, one with blood on shirt tell me, #westgate attackers were telling muslims to leave, asking who is prophets mother?

Locked in a storeroom

Faith Wafula worked as a part-time diaper saleswoman in Nakumatt, the big goods store. She told the Nation newspaper how she and her colleagues locked themselves in a store room after gunmen strafed the floor. When they were finally rescued, it took them a long time to believe that their rescuers were actually the police.

“The lights kept going on and off, but business went on as usual,” she said. This was shortly followed by a mini-explosion which sent everyone in panic mode before the attackers walked in.

According to Ms Wafula they first kept shooting in the air and everyone was scampering for safety. She says four people were shot on her floor, including two of her colleagues. The attackers proceeded to another section leaving everyone hiding.

She says it took close to two hours before police came to their rescue. She says they were foreign officers.

She says the hostages who had been locked inside were reluctant to come down because “they were not the normal cops.”

“We were expecting Kenyan police officers, so it took a lot of persuading from the rescue officers to bring us because we were not sure of their identity,” she says.

They finally agreed to come down and were ushered out one by one by the rescue officers.

‘Policeman shot in the stomach asked me to photo him’

A photo journalist from Reuters was near the mall when the shooting started. He went inside with a troop of police, one of whom got shot in the stomach. He left unharmed after two hours. He recounts what he saw.

I saw this younger guy who was hit by shrapnel. His leg was broken, but he wasn’t bleeding that heavily. I didn’t want to move him and make it worse. If I started helping, I could do something wrong. I am not a doctor. I just tried to calm him down. I said, “The medics are coming. You will be alright. You are OK.”

I entered the mall and followed the police searching room by room until we ended up on the ground floor where the supermarket is located.

A policeman got shot in the stomach. He asked me to take a picture of him screaming and asked me for help. I tried to help him but I guess he was in shock or something because when I helped him up he started firing his rifle into the floor. He almost shot me accidentally. Then he dropped the weapon.

17 of us hid in a kitchen

Another survivor, Surajit Borkakyoty, told the BBC it was “total chaos” as gunfire came from a higher level floor. He said he and 20 others found themselves in the kitchen of a cafe, and moved fridges and freezers to block the passageways.

“There’s a coffee shop on the top floor of the mall, and suddenly, all of a sudden, we started hearing gunshots on the ground floor and the first floor and it suddenly turned into a war-like situation.

“We ran towards the rooftop of the parking lot, adjacent to the coffee shop. Suddenly someone started on that side as well so we ran back into the café. It was total chaos, luckily we got inside a cupboard of the coffee shop.

“After a while one of the boys in the coffee shop called to us ‘Why don’t you come out inside the kitchen?’

“So there were many people inside the kitchen. We shut the doors and brought the big refrigerators. Me and wife – almost 17 people were there in a very small space. There were children there, they were just crying.

“We were stuck for almost 2.5 hours. We could hear continuous gunfire it was like when you see war on the television.”

‘We hid in dental clinic’

Our International Editor Lindsey Hilsum had this report of a friend trapped in the mall with her children and how they survived by diving into a dentist’s office.

One of my friends was in Westgate with her eight-year-old daughter, paying the dentist when she heard gunshots. “I didn’t see who was shooting but I saw people falling down dead,” she said.

She covered her daughter’s eyes and hustled her into the dental clinic, where they locked themselves in, turned off the lights and hunkered down for four hours, listening to gunfire, until they were rescued. On the way out, she saw three bodies.

“I thought I had had a bad time until I realised that other people are in there still,” she said. “Now I feel lucky.”

They said a woman didn’t look like a Muslim, and shot her

After reluctantly going Saturday shopping, one woman, Aisha, describes to the Nation how she decided to watch a children’s cooking competition on the roof of the carpark. She survived by hiding behind a box in a tent with children and other strangers.

She also describes how gunmen shot one woman dead after she professed to be a Muslim but the gunman said she did not look like one.

I saw the two figures coming up to the rooftop. They had guns and it took me a moment to notice the grenades hanging from their belts.

Their faces were uncovered, exposed to us as if they almost didn’t care if we could identify them later. I immediately began to suspect that I would not be leaving Westgate alive.

In that moment, the fear was devastating. When the gunmen begun shooting, the crowd broke into screams. People started running in panic, with little sense of direction. I was also jolted into action. I ran into the tent that had acted as a kitchen for the children and hid myself there.

At first, I thought they were shooting at random. However, I soon noticed that people running and screaming were most often the ones hit by the bullets. Amid the noise, I heard the gunmen call out for the Muslims.

“If you are Muslim,” they said, “you can get up and leave.”

But it wasn’t that easy. Muslims had to prove their faith. They had to recite verses from the Koran before they could be set free. And even then, you could still lose your life. One lady, who said she was a Muslim but did not “look like a Muslim” was shot.

I am not quite sure why I didn’t profess my religion. Perhaps it was out of fear. Perhaps it was out of a sense of defiance.

Hidden behind boxes and tables in the tent, strangers became closer than friends. The gunmen must have known our location; there were only so many places we could have hidden on the rooftop.

Nevertheless, we calmed each other, urged the children to be quiet as if in our utter silence we could suddenly become invincible. But despite our best efforts, some of the youngest children still cried, instinctively aware of the danger.

[…] We must have been hidden for at least 20 minutes when I heard one of the gunmen receive a call on his mobile phone.

[…] A few minutes after he received the call, the gunmen shot randomly on the rooftop and left. Looking back, I think these last shots were meant to scare us more so that we would not move.

We were rescued shortly afterwards and as I walked through Westgate, past the corpses, I felt helpless that I could not do anything to stop this. It had only been about an hour since our ordeal had begun.