Under a blaze of search lights, rescue workers struggled through the night Friday to save victims from two terrorist bomb blasts that ripped through U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, leaving at least 82 dead and more than 1,600 wounded.
The suspected car-bomb explosions, within minutes of each other Friday morning, destroyed much of the embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and leveled an office building next to the embassy in Nairobi, the capital of Kenya.
U.S. officials said that the casualties included at least eight dead Americans in Nairobi and that five others were missing. No Americans were believed killed in Tanzania.
The explosions occurred just minutes from each other, more than 450 miles apart, turning the bustling downtown zones of two major African capitals into bloody scenes of carnage. The blast in a parking lot of the embassy in Dar es Salaam occurred at about 10.35 a.m., followed almost immediately by the explosion in the Kenyan capital.
The bomb in Nairobi, the more powerful of the two, collapsed a building next to the embassy, destroying everything in its path along a street packed with cars, trucks, buses and people passing by on their Friday morning rounds. The blast left a large blackened crater in a parking lot beside the embassy.
At least 75 people were killed and 1,600 wounded in Nairobi, according to Red Cross and ambulance officials. At least seven people were killed and 70 hurt in Tanzania, officials said.
In Washington, President Clinton condemned the bombings as cowardly terrorist attacks and vowed the U.S. would pursue the assailants wherever they may be.
“This appears to have been a very well-coordinated, very well-planned attack, clearly not the work of amateurs,” said P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the White House National Security Council.
In Cairo, the international Arabic daily newspaper Al-Hayat reported in its Saturday editions that it had received a call claiming responsibility for the bombings from a previously unknown group called the Liberation Army of the Islamic Sanctuaries. The claim could not be independently verified.
Atop a hill of rubble where a building beside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi used to be, dozens of rescuers worked frantically to pick through the rubble. One of them swung a pickax, laboring with the help of a huge spotlight, as giant clouds of dust rose off the pile.
Using a huge crane, Kenyan soldiers and Red Cross workers strained to move some of the big concrete blocks but found the going slow. Crews of welders sawed through some of the twisted girders to get to people they could hear buried in the tumbled mounds of concrete.
“We hear the screams of a woman,” said Vincent Nicod, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Nairobi. He was helping direct the rescue operation. “If we take too many things off the pile too quickly, it could collapse and kill them. They are in a pocket. We have to be extremely, extremely careful.”
Blood still stained the sidewalk in front of the embassy. Earlier, rescue workers took away dozens of charred and dismembered bodies as they helped hundreds of injured Kenyans, many of them bleeding profusely and in shock.
As night fell, U.S. Marines and plainclothes embassy security personnel bearing automatic rifles and shotguns surrounded the building and put up a makeshift fence, keeping onlookers away.
Officials said the bodies of the dead Americans were still inside the embassy, waiting for investigators to arrive. At one point, one rescue worker said, embassy officials brought five bodies under green canvas and set them on embassy window sills, where the windows had been blasted away.
Rescue workers gathered below thought the embassy officials were going to lower their dead colleagues, but then embassy workers took them back inside the building.
Crowds of onlookers remained at the scene after midnight, almost 14 hours after the explosion. Some of them were relatives of people who had been in the buildings and of whom they had no word; others came just to look.
Windows in downtown Nairobi were shattered for 10 blocks in every direction. Windshields were blown out on cars and buses. Outside the embassy, three or four burned-out cars had been bulldozed into a pile.
Bodies hung out of windows in a charred bus in the Kenyan capital. Shattered cars were left smoldering on the street amid the debris. Police helicopters hovered overhead.
“It is horrific to hear moaning, sighs and whimpers from under the rubble when we can do so little to reach victims quickly,” Red Cross spokeswoman Nina Galbe said as night fell. “The longer they’re trapped, the less their chances for survival.”
The Ufundi Co-op House, which houses a secretarial college and offices, collapsed inward on itself, trapping scores of people. The reinforced embassy building remained standing and most of the 200 people inside walked out, but its rear offices were devastated.
Three buses on the avenue outside were destroyed and several cars were left twisted hunks of blackened metal. The dismembered bodies of at least fifteen people were found on the street near the blast site. People began crawling over the mountain of concrete and steel that had been the Ufundi House, clawing at the debris to free people trapped inside.
Minutes later, hundreds of office workers poured out of nearby buildings, many of them lacerated by rubble and glass. More than 1,000 people were treated at local hospitals, hospital officials said.
In Dar es Salaam, embassy officials said they did not know who was behind the bombing.
“At this point only several hours after the bombing we have no idea what the motives of the bombers were,” said John Lange, the deputy chief of mission at the embassy. ” All we know is that an explosion occurred right in front of our embassy.”
U.S. intelligence officials around the world worked intensively to identify the attackers. In Nairobi, witnesses told rescue workers who got to the scene within five minutes of the blast that two cars pulled up to the driveway that leads to the underground parking lot under the embassy shortly before the explosion.
When the cars were stopped, the witnesses said, the four occupants began arguing with the Kenyan guards outside the underground parking lot.
Some witnesses said that the four men appeared to be Arab-speaking. They said one shot one of the guards at the entrance. Then the men fled, but there was a small explosion and they ran back toward the cars, apparently to reset an explosive device.
But then a much larger explosion went off. At that point, some witnesses said, the men tried to run away, but one was apprehended. Kenyan authorities said they had detained one Arabic man for questioning in the bombing.
The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, was cut on the lip and helped from the Cooperative Bank House, where she had just given a news conference.
The newly confirmed ambassador to Tanzania, Charles Stith, had not yet arrived there.
Neither country has a history as a site of international terrorist attacks. Both embassies were considered low-risk, perhaps making them more attractive targets.
Compared with other African countries, foreigners can enter and leave Kenya and Tanzania with relative ease, possibly making it easier for terrorists to carry out an attack.
In front of the darkened embassy, U.S. Marines in full battle gear stood guard, guns in combat position, as night fell. They were guarding a disaster site, but there were still several bodies of American officials and embassy employees inside, waiting to be transported to a mortuary.
“There were two explosions, that’s all I know,” said Gunnery Sgt. Gary Cross, who was in a stairwell when the bomb went off. “The whole building started shaking and stuff started falling.”
State Department officials acknowledged the two U.S. Embassies that were bombed did not meet security standards that were ordered for the State Department’s overseas posts following terrorist attacks against the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in the early 1980s.
The embassies had never been modified to fully comply with the tougher security standards called for in 1985 by a panel headed by retired Adm. Bobby Inman, largely because the White House and Congress never provided enough money to finance a worldwide conversion of all U.S. embassies, officials said.
Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi issued a statement condemning the attack and said he would do anything possible “to bring the perpetrators of the heinous crime to book.”
In New York, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan described the blasts as “indiscriminate terrorism.”
UN General Assembly President Hennady Udovenko condemned the bombings as “acts of insane and barbarous terror.”
