But a tweet, whose origin is unclear, stirred curiosity when it claimed that among the dozen or so al-Shabaab
... Somalia's version of the Taliban, functioning as an arm of al-Qaeda...
attackers in Nairobi were a Minneapolis and a St Paul resident of Somali origin.
By Sunday evening, cable news channels had dispatched teams to Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota. A week later, the news crews have left and the Westgate siege has ended, but life for the Somali community in the Twin Cities may never be the same again.
"We have been under attack by the media and law enforcement agencies who have been going around asking questions. It is traumatising and unsettling to be under such scrutiny and harassment," Mr Abdi Noor, a Kenyan Somali who lives in St Paul, the city across the Mississippi River from Minneapolis, told the Sunday Nation.
Community leaders said on Wednesday that they feared a backlash after the Nairobi attack that left at least 70 people dead. But they acknowledged that al-Shabaab has in the past recruited from the Somali-American community in Minnesota, the largest in the United States.
US media reports indicate that at least 20 young Somali men from the state have since 2007 travelled to Somalia to join al-Shabaab. One was a jacket wallah who died in Mogadishu. The Minnesota Somali community has been the focus of a federal investigation ever since.