Three teams drawn from the General Service Unit elite Recce squad took the lead in an effort to take control of the situation in riverside drive terror attack that left several people with injuries.
Other armed teams, both in civilian and police uniform were seen carefully evacuating hundreds of people who were caught in the incident.
“Breath in, breath in…” they would tell the visibly frightened survivors.
Four choppers, armoured vehicles and hundreds of armed police officers took strategic positions to ensure they got the situation under control.
This followed a drawn-out hostage crisis that started when the terrorists took over the upscale complex at 3pm on Tuesday. By 3am the following day, the special forces had combed through six floors before trapping the attackers.
The strategy to neutralize the terrorist took 14 commandos at dawn Wednesday, ending a 12-hour siege at the 14 Riverside complex, and killing four terrorist.
Backed by remote-controlled robots, which were used for surveillance and to map out the floors the attackers were suspected to be holed up, the commandos finally established that the killers were on the seventh floor.
At this point, the two commando units with seven members each, were on third floor and were solely relying on a robot that had gone up to the sixth floor and located the militants on the upper floor based on electronic signals.
Swiftly, one team ran up the stairs and locked the exit leading to the sixth floor. They held their positions on the fifth floor.
All this time the commandos had switched off power supply to the entire building to disable the lifts.
The second team of seven officers used ropes to scale the sides of the building and accessed the seventh floor through a window.
Their entry forced the terrorists, who were at one far end, to try retreating to the sixth floor, but they realised the door leading to the staircase had been locked.
At the same time, members of the National Security Advisory Committee (NSAC), who were monitoring developments from Harambee House, were updated on what had just transpired.
The committee sought to know whether all the terrorists had been cornered.
After being informed of the killers’ whereabouts, the NSAC advised that all the people who had been trapped in the adjacent blocks be freed.
“It was dark and we knew the floor where they were trapped was up there. We moved to the other blocks and managed to free 174 people who had been trapped for close to 12 hours,” said an official.
The team felt that if they waited until morning to mount a rescue operation, it would endanger the lives of those who were trapped because the terrorists would see their movements and strike.
After freeing all the people, a decision was made to make a final push and target where the gang was hiding.