The hostage standoff at Nairobi's Westgate Mall continues, but survivors are telling horrific stories of terrorists executing people based on whether they knew the name of Mohammed's mother.

Daily Mail:

Men, women and children were lined up and then gunned down with AK-47s after failing to name the Prophet Mohammed's mother or recite passages from the Koran - sure-fire proof they were 'kafirs', or non-believers.

Others fled and sought refuge in shops, bank vaults and store rooms as grenades exploded and bullets fired around them.

The fortunate ones managed to emerge blood-splattered and terrified, with the wounded pushed out in shopping trolleys.

Hannah Chisholm, 21, from Haslemere, Surrey, described the terror and confusion at the Westgate Mall, which she was visiting while on holiday.

[...]

Greg Aldous, from New Zealand, told how he hid in a box and watched a man being gunned down 30ft away from him. He said the terrorists 'were coming in through the front, they were coming in through the back and we were just sitting ducks'.

He added: 'These are Islamic fundamentalist nutcases. They just shot and killed anybody. They are horrible.'

He eventually escaped under the cover of darkness to a lorry-loading depot where people were panicking and screaming.

'My instinct was to hide and I jumped into a large box containing supermarket cartons and hid there,' he said. 'I only survived the massacre because I kept out of sight.

'If they had found me... I'm white, so I'm dead. They're not even going to think twice. They hate your skin colour.' Radio presenter Saadia Ahmed was one of the 1,000 who managed to flee. She said: 'I witnessed a few people get up and say something in Arabic and the gunmen let them go.

'A colleague of mine said he was Muslim and recited something in Arabic and they let him go as well.'

Terrorists are usually more indiscriminate about who they kill. Christians, Muslins, Jews - it never seems to matter.

This wrinkle may mean that al-Shabab reads the polls and sees how unpopular al-Qaeda is - largely because they kill more Muslims than anyone else. What is truly chilling is that the gunmen apparently took their time, cold bloodedly executing non-Muslims. They apparently had little fear of police, which makes sense given that there were 10-15 of them armed with heavy automatic weapons.

Sadly, once police make their way through that mall and thoroughly search it, it is likely that the death toll will rise considerably.