NAIROBI: Kenya’s Westgate shopping mall reopened for business on Saturday, almost two years after Somali gunmen stormed in and massacred 67 shoppers and staff in four days of carnage.

The complex, Nairobi’s most upmarket shopping center and a magnet for the east African nation’s growing middle class and expatriates, was badly damaged in the assault by the Al-Qaeda-affiliated Shabab rebels and has undergone months of renovation.

Around 50 shoppers — some of them survivors of the massacre — queued to be the first to pass through newly-installed metal detectors at the main entrance, after Nairobi governor Evans Kidero and Atul Shah, owner of the main regional supermarket chain Nakumatt, declared the mall back in business in a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“They didn’t kill our spirit,” Kidero said. “We are resilient, we are positive, we always look forward, as demonstrated by the number of people who have come here today.”

“Nairobi is going to boom,” he said, adding next weekend’s visit of US President Barack Obama was also “a vote a confidence for our city and our country.”

By midday, the mall had filled up with hundreds of shoppers. With no memorial of any kind for those who died, fresh coats of paint and the bullet holes filled in, there was no reminder of the horror of September 2013.

“Today we are excited because we are back on our feet, and we can convince the world that terrorism is not bringing us down,” said Ben Mulla, a 34-year-old communications contractor and a siege survivor.

But he said he still had painful memories of the attack.

“I was coming to have a business lunch. The shooting was intense, and I went to hide in a flowerbed. I saw four terrorists... they shot at me and the ricochet from the wall went in my leg. They shot a security guard right in front of me,” he recounted.

“They were young men. They were emotionless. They seemed to be enjoying what they were doing. Their faces I will never forget for the rest of my life.”

The Shabab said they attacked Westgate, which is partly Israeli-owned, as retaliation for the presence of Kenyan troops in Somalia as part of an African Union force supporting the internationally-backed Mogadishu government.

Since Westgate, the Shabab have continued to strike on Kenyan soil, with an even bigger attack in April when another four suicide attackers massacred 148 people in Kenya’s northeastern Garissa University, most of them students.