Pregnant Turkish woman killed in Kenyan mall massacre

ISTANBUL

A recent Facebook picture of Elif Yavuz shows her clearly pregnant as she meets former US president Bill Clinton.

A Turkish-Dutch woman who was eight months pregnant has been identified as one of those killed in a deadly attack on an upscale Kenyan shopping mall by an al-Qaeda-linked group.

Elif Yavuz, had completed a PhD in public health policy at Harvard University and was a specialist on malaria, and her partner, Ross Langdon, were killed in Nairobi. Yavuz worked for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Kenya and had been visited in that role last month by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

According to daily Hürriyet, the couple met in Nairobi, and had returned to the Kenyan capital as the due date of their first child approached.

Langdon was a founding director of prize-winning architecture firm Regional Associates, which has offices in London and Melbourne.

Friends and colleagues used blogs and the couple's social media profiles to pay tribute to the pair, who were due to become parents for the first time in two weeks.

"Such tragic news about beautiful Ross Langdon & his pregnant partner Elif Yavuz in Nairobi. Very special souls," wrote Sydney designer Liane Rossler on Twitter, AFP reported. "Horrible news that Ross Langdon and his wife were killed in the Nairobi attacks," added Sydney architect Marcus Trimble.

"They didn't want to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, so they had chosen names for both sexes," a friend who visited the couple in Nairobi in the past week wrote on Yavuz's Facebook page, the newspaper reported.