Somalis living in Nairobi fear of ongoing backlash following the terrorist attack at Westgate Shopping Mall carried out by Al Shabaab, the Washington Post reported.
In an interview with the Post, Ubah Abubakar -- an American citizen of Somali origin living in Nairobi -- discussed an incident she had with authorities on Sunday.
After police fired shots outside of her home and entered without a warrant, her and her roommate were taken to a police station downtown where they stayed for two nights.
"We were shaking," said Abubakar, 41. "They broke apart every room. They confiscated our passports, our cellphones, our laptops. They even took my client list."
After Abubaker called and texted a friend who witnessed the attack at Westgate, Kenyan authorities decided to detain her.
Once her family contacted the U.S. Embassy to intervene, Abubaker and her roommate, a Somali Canadian, were released on Tuesday.
The investigation into Abubaker and her roommate reflects a troubling situation for Somalis living in Nairobi ever since Al Shabaab militants performed the deadliest attack in Kenya since the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombing.
"They are rounding up anybody just for the sake they are Somali, or who looks Somali," she said. "What makes me mad is that the time and resources they spend on arresting Somalis, they could spend on tracking the real culprits."
A spokeswoman for the Kenyan police force denied any ethnic profiling.
"There is no tribe that we are targeting, neither any community," said spokeswoman Zipporah Mboroki.
Abdul Haji, a Kenyan businessman of Somali descent, was hailed as a hero after he rescued an American woman and her three children during the Westgate attack. Although he intended to stay away from the spotlight, he decided to speak out to counter the anti-Somali attitude in Nairobi.
In addition to the unwarranted interrogations of Somali residents in Kenya, the official amount of deaths and injured victims changed throughout the attack as well as to the total number of attackers -- reflecting other organizational issues among security forces in the country.
At an interdenominational prayer service on Tuesday, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said he created a special committee to investigate lapses in the government's response to the attack after security forces were criticized for a lack of coordination at the beginning of the four-day siege.
