Kenya attack: No help from MEA, says slain Indian's family

Forty three-year-old Sridhar Natarajan was one of the casualties of the shootout when armed gunmen stormed the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday. His wife Manjula, 38, was also injured in the crossfire and is currently in a critical condition in a hospital in Nairobi. [caption id=“attachment_1128545” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Kenya security personnel take cover outside the Westgate Mall after shooting started inside the mall. AP image[/caption] Natarajan’s family members, since Sunday night, have been doing everything to arrange for tickets to Nairobi for Sridhar’s brother, Sanjivi Nataraj, so that he can go claim his brother’s body. He will also have to attend to Manjula, who is scheduled to undergo surgeries this week. But as a family member from Chennai tells Firstpost, the family has been caught in a bureaucratic tangle that threatened to derail his trip. “We started planning on getting Sanjivi to Nairobi last night,” says the family member, who did not want to be named, told Firstpost. According to the family, the Ministry of External Affairs had not contacted them till last night, so they made their own arrangements. Sanjivi tried to leave at 4.30am on Monday morning on a Qatar flight. But at the airport, he was stopped because he did not taken vaccination for yellow fever. “We began contacting officials, and we were told that he should arrive at the Port Office for vaccinations at any time today morning,” says the relative. “But when he reached there, the office was shut. It turned out that the officials had forgotten to tell them to keep the clinic open for him,” the relative said. Sanjivi was told that he could only be vaccinated on Wednesday. “When he came back home, he got a call at 3.30 pm, saying he should come back to the office for his vaccination, but now with a spare passport holder-since the rules mandate that two people must be travelling for a vial of yellow fever vaccine to be opened,” said the family member. “Firstly, this back-and-forth at such a time of crisis in inconvenient to say the least. He had family matters to take care of. There were logistical reasons that he could not go for this,” he said. The confrontation erupted into “heated words,” recounts the family member. “The Ministry of External Affairs has insisted to the media and everyone else they speak to that they are doing everything for us, but this is not true,” said the relative.“They told us that we were being ‘high-maintenance’, even though they were doing everything to help us” Sridhar and his wife had moved to Nigeria five years ago and later shifted to Kenya after he got a job with a pharma firm in Nairobi. The other Indian who died in the attack was identified as Paramshu Jain, the 8-year-old son of a banker in Nairobi. Finally after much hue and cry the Director arranged for a spare passport holder to show up pro-forma, and Sanjivi is now hoping to leave at 4.30am on Tuesday morning. “We are hoping there are no more goof-ups at the Nairobi airport,” says the relative. Manjula has already undergone one surgery, and is currently critical but stable. She is scheduled for several more macrofacial surgeries over the coming week. “There has been very little information flowing from the Ministry of External Affairs,” says the relative. “We have had to do everything for ourselves. Their reaction has been shoddy, to say the least.”