Well, what happened was that they thought that loads of people would go shopping in the landside mall as you could go there without security, so people accompanying passengers and just about anyone else would want to go shopping there. However, this never happened, as I guess the shops were more expensive than the shops in conventional malls, and of course no traveler was going to shop there if they could get the same duty free 5 minutes later so the whole thing turned out to be a rather big commercial disaster instead of the goldmine it was expected to be.

On the other side the security specifications were changed shortly before the airport opened, with far more space required than in the original plans, so much more space was needed for security. I guess that they are now going to use the wasted space from the hopeless landside mall for more checkin facilities, which are desperately required, as per ebzed's post.