As a former military officer, David Robertson knows the sound of gunfire. That may have saved his life, or at least his vision, when the terrorist bomb blast ripped through the U.S. Embassy in this Kenyan capital Friday.
The American diplomat looked out a window when he heard a small explosion after arriving at work that day. It was followed, he said, by gunshots, and his instincts told him to turn away from the window. A moment later, a second, monumental explosion burst every pane of glass for blocks in every direction.
“At the window, I heard `bam, bam, bam!’ ” said Robertson, 35, from his hospital bed Saturday. “Next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I had stuff all over me. My face was covered in blood and my shirt was all red.”
With a torn ear, broken teeth and a gashed arm, Robertson fared better than thousands of other casualties of Friday’s explosion. But the tale of his close call may be of interest to investigators trying to piece together who and what caused the bomb blast, for it coincides with other witnesses’ reports of shooting at the scene.
As the death toll mounted and rescue operations intensified Saturday, the terrorist bombing in Nairobi and its twin explosion in Tanzania reverberated across Africa, the Middle East and the United States. Scores of U.S. investigators were headed for the region to try to reconstruct what happened.
By Saturday night, officials said at least 148 people had been killed in the two blasts. The injured numbered more than 4,000. Officials said 11 Americans had died in Nairobi and another four were missing, while 14 Kenyan employees of the embassy also died.
In the blast at the embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, eight people died and another 65 were injured. Initial investigations suggest that a bomb was planted in an embassy-owned oil truck and exploded as it returned to the mission through the main gate, a police official told reporters there.
Kenyans said the bombing Friday morning was the worst terrorist act they had ever seen. For the most part, the country has escaped the legacy of civil war and armed rebellion plaguing many of its neighbors, and despite frequent tribal bloodshed, crime here is mostly small-time robbery and corruption.
The last well-known terrorist attack was in 1979, when a little-known Arab group blew up the Norfolk Hotel, killing several safari-bound tourists, in revenge for Kenya’s help to Israel when it staged its daring hostage rescue from a hijacked plane in Entebbe, Uganda.
But as of 10:40 a.m. Friday, Kenyans may never again feel securely out of the line of fire.
The blast occurred in an alley between the concrete bunker of an embassy and an adjacent five-story secretarial college and office complex called the Ufundi Co-op House.
Rescue workers on the scene said witnesses told them the explosion followed an argument between embassy security guards and four men, apparently Arabic speakers, who tried to drive a car into the underground parking garage beneath the embassy.
Evelyn Nyaboke, a Red Cross worker who arrived minutes after the blast, said witnesses told her one of the men fired at least one shot at one of the security guards. Soon after, she said, there were two explosions.
“The first one wasn’t as strong,” said Nyaboke, speaking during a break from her rescue work at the flattened Ufundi building. “So two of the (men) ran back and then it blew up again.”
Nyaboke said the two other men survived the blast and tried to flee but were chased down and caught by police. An Associated Press photographer earlier reported he had seen one Arabic-speaking man taken into custody by Kenyan police.
U.S. Embassy officials said they had no information about arrests connected to the bombing. They would not comment on speculation about who might have been responsible.
Kenyan Foreign Minister Bonaya Godana said at a news conference that the blast apparently was caused by a bomb in a car that was trying to enter the parking lot beneath the embassy.
“It is probable that in fact the person tried to get in and could not get into the basement,” he said. “Whether it was suicidal and the person involved was in it or not is difficult to say.”
The blast shook Nairobi for 3 miles in every direction, sending a wide column of black smoke into the sky over the neighborhood of government offices and bank buildings. Witnesses said there followed a moment of silence, then a storm of shattered glass rained on the streets and nearby cars exploded in fire.
Chaos ensued, with bloodied victims staggering out of buildings, collapsing on sidewalks and running headfirst into passersby and rescue workers streaming to the scene to help. Some victims were carried out atop thick security doors that had been blown off their hinges. Traffic snarls prevented many ambulances and rescue vehicles from reaching the scene.
The blast destroyed several commuter buses that had been passing. Television footage showed one driver nearly thrown through his window, where he apparently died, and other bodies slumped in the buses.
At the time of the blast, Ambassador Prudence Bushnell was meeting with Kenyan Trade Minister Joseph Kamotho at his office on the 18th floor of a bank building near the embassy.
She told reporters Saturday that she asked if the first explosion was due to construction project but that the second one threw her to the floor.
With a severely cut upper lip and gashes on her hands, she and the bloodied minister stumbled down a crowded, smoky stairwell where every doorwell was blown in and the banister was “wet with blood.”
Once outside, she said she saw a vehicle burning near where the suspected car bomb went off. She said there are usually three security guards at the entrance to the parking garage beneath the embassy but that none of them are armed. She said the entrance also is monitored by closed-circuit television cameras.
“We lost some of those guards,” Bushnell said. “It’s in everybody’s interest to find out who is behind this evil. . . . I expect it’s going to take a while.”
At the embassy, heavily armed U.S. Marines and other security officials cordoned off the area immediately after the blast, some with two hands on their pistols, ready to fire, and they remained at nervous attention through the weekend. The building remained standing, but every window at its rear was blown out and offices there were gutted.
Next door, the Ufundi Co-op House had crumbled into a small hill of rubble, dust and debris, and several dozen rescue workers assembled on top to sort through it.
Twelve hours after the blast, Kazim Butt was among those standing in a crowd of onlookers bathed in search lights and transfixed on the gutted embassy office where his missing brother-in-law had worked.
Throughout the day, like other desperate Kenyans with missing relatives, Butt had searched every hospital in Nairobi and found no trace of his wife’s brother, Farhat Sheikh, an embassy cashier.
The bomb crater, gouged from an alley between the embassy and an office block that was reduced to rubble, lay outside Sheikh’s window.
Underfoot, blood stains could still be seen on sidewalks that sparkled with millions of shards of glass that had rained down on victims from above.
“A nurse at the embassy told me to prepare my brother-in-law’s wife 98 percent (for the worst),” said Butt, whose relative was still missing Saturday. “He was in the worst-hit area, right here where the damn thing went off.”
Back at Nairobi Hospital, Robertson said he felt lucky, despite the bandages wrapped around his head and stitched-up ear lobe. He said he lost a co-worker in the blast, though he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it.
“He was a friend,” said Robertson, hours before he was to be evacuated to Germany. “I was lucky.”
