It was one of the most moving images of Kenya’s Westgate Mall terror attack — a little girl running in terror across an empty corridor to the outstretched arm of her rescuer.
Now The Daily Telegraph can tell the remarkable stories of both the child and her saviour. Portia is the four-year-old daughter of American expatriates Katherine and Philip Walton, both IT workers.
The man who saved her along with her mother and two sisters is Abdul Haji, a Somali Muslim and the son of a former security minister in the Kenyan government.
Faced with a long afternoon trapped in the house with her five children last Saturday, Mrs Walton decided on a quick excursion — a trip to Nairobi’s popular mall.
Her two teenage boys went ahead, with Walton following shortly after with her three daughters, including Portia.
Four hours later, the family lay pinned to the ground opposite the supermarket where they did their weekly shop as gunmen hurled grenades and sprayed bullets just yards from them.
“We were just going to meet my two older boys in the supermarket when we heard an explosion,” said Walton, 38, from North Carolina, who moved to Kenya with her family two years ago.
“I grabbed the girls and started running. A woman pulled us behind a promotional table opposite. I could see the bullets hitting above the shops and hear the screaming all around us.”
She remembers only fragments of the hours that followed which she spent huddled under the table, but, according to Philip Walton, 39, she saw enough of the attackers to be able to describe several of them in detail afterwards.
“She heard them talking to people, telling them to stand up followed by gunshots,” he recalled. “The thing that’s troubling her now is she can’t forget the smell of the gunpowder.”
During their ordeal, the couple’s three daughters, aged four, two and 13 months, were shielded and calmed by an injured Kenyan woman and two Indian women who hid with them.
“They were so still and quiet,” Katherine Walton said. “My baby was screaming when there was shooting but between that, she just slept. In one lull in the fighting, my two year-old and the baby were playing together with my phone. I couldn’t understand how they could be acting like everything was fine.”
Yards away from them she saw a man with a pistol who was shooting at a heavily armed young jihadi in a bandana who was taunting him to come closer.
That man was Abdul Haji, who had rushed to the mall after getting a text message from his brother who was trapped inside.
“We saw a lot of dead people. Very young people, children, old ladies, you cannot imagine,” Haji told the Kenyan television station NTV.
“From what they were doing, you could tell that these were not normal people. The fact that he was making a joke out of this whole thing made me much more angry and determined to engage them, and to shame them.”
Haji said his father taught him to use a gun to protect their cattle from bandits when he was growing up.
Last Saturday, he used his skills to provide fire cover for the Kenyan Red Cross workers and, over a period of three hours, help to evacuate some of the 1,000 people who escaped the mall in the initial stages of a siege that would last three days and leave at least 72 people dead. As he stood with a fellow rescuer crouched outside the Nakumatt supermarket, Haji said he noticed the women hiding under the table.
“Just a few minutes ago we were exchanging fire with the terrorists and these people were right in the middle of it, in the crossfire. We regrouped and we started to strategize on how to get them out of there,” he said.
He asked the women to move toward them but they indicated they had children with them and could not all run together.
Haji said he asked Walton if one of the older children could be encouraged to run toward him.
Portia emerged and ran across the deserted corridor.
The moment was captured by a Reuters photographer, Goran Tomasevic, in a dramatic image that was beamed around the world.