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Westgate: Family pleads for son’s body


It has been an agonising week for the family of Christopher Kennedy Chewa, a Westgate Mall victim.

The body of their loved one is yet to be released to them for burial.

For three consecutive days, they have been making trips to the City Mortuary hoping that the pathologist will perform a postmortem on their kin.

But because the bodies from the mall are undergoing a thorough scrutiny by forensic experts as part of investigations, they have had to wait.

Healing process

His sudden death has caused the family a lot of pain and grief.

The drag, the family says, is only delaying their healing process.

Ms Agnes Wangui Mutua says the family was shocked by the death of the 26 year-old, an only child.

They only came to know about it after three days of searching and hoping to find him in hospitals.

Ms Mutua, Chewa’s aunt, says they  prayed that they would find him alive.

“We had made the decision  as  a family not to visit the mortuary until we checked all the hospitals,”  She shares as she busts into tears during an interview with NairobiNews at the mortuary.

And now, she says all they want is his body released to give him a decent send off.

“Every time we come we are told to wait for the pathologist, but since today he has come we are hoping he will perform the postmortem,” she says outside the mortuary.

Chewa was working with a tour company in the city before he met his death.

According to Ms Mutua, he had picked one of their clients,  a foreigner  to drop him at Village Market, but  they later decided to go to Westgate.

He had dropped his client and was at the parking area where he was ambushed by the terrorist and shot dead.

During the interview, other families kept flocking to the mortuary searching for their missing relatives.

By Tuesday, there were no reports of more bodies recovered from the collapsed Westgate   building.