Pledging to “pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is done,” President Clinton said Saturday that the United States would “never give up” the hunt for the culprits in the coordinated bombing attacks on U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Defending past U.S. investigations into terrorist attacks against American facilities overseas, Clinton used his weekly radio address to reassure the nation that the full weight of the government would be brought against those responsible for the attacks that left more than 148 dead and more than 4,000 wounded.
“In recent years, we have captured major terrorists in the far corners of the world and brought them to America to answer for their crimes, sometimes years after they were committed,” Clinton said.
As examples, the president cited the arrests and convictions of those responsible for detonating a bomb beneath New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 and of a Pakistani who shot employees outside the CIA headquarters in suburban Washington in 1993.
The president’s remarks, nonetheless, underscored past difficulty that U.S. authorities have had in tracking down those responsible for assaults against U.S. interests. Several of the most recent and deadly attacks on U.S. posts remain unsolved, including the 1996 car bombing of Khobar Towers residences in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. airmen.
A previously unknown group calling itself the Islamic Army for the Liberation of Holy Places claimed responsibility for Friday’s embassy bombings and vowed more attacks to drive American and Western troops from Muslim countries.
A series of statements sent to a television station in Qatar on Saturday said the bombing in Nairobi, Kenya, was carried out by two men from Mecca in Saudi Arabia, while an Egyptian staged the attack in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
P.J. Crowley, spokesman for the White House National Security Council, said that U.S. investigators were examining claims of responsibility that had been made in relation to the attacks.
He said they were also trying to learn more about witness accounts that there was gunfire and possibly the arrest of an suspect in Nairobi as the bomb there erupted. Crowley said the U.S. did not have its own, independent information on the reported gunfire or arrest.
Clinton discussed the events in East Africa on Saturday with French President Jacques Chirac, who expressed sympathy over the loss of life. President Clinton’s national security advisers, joined by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh, met for 90 minutes at the White House to assess the situation and consider further steps.
Washington continued its rapid response to the crisis by dispatching 14 relief flights and supplies as well as two Marine Fleet Anti-Terrorist Security Teams, known as FAST contingents. Each team of 50 Marines will provide security at the bombing scenes as investigators begin picking through the piles of debris and charred auto chassis left by the explosions.
Friday’s bombings were effectively simultaneous, though each occurred at African capitals more than 400 miles apart. A car bomb parked in front of the seaside U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam went off and within minutes, a bomb exploded in a car parked behind the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.
The chaos after Friday’s assaults, especially the substantial havoc wreaked by the explosion in Nairobi, will make the work of solving both crimes that much more difficult, officials said.
The bomb sites were scattered and trampled by rescuers and frantic onlookers whose main concern, naturally enough, was for the victims trapped inside the buildings.
The rescue effort, while heroic, leaves investigators with an even more confused jigsaw puzzle to piece together.
“This is their worst nightmare,” said Neil Livingstone, a security expert who recently conducted a Middle East seminar on investigating terrorists crime scenes. “Frankly, the recovery operation is taking such precedence, as it should, that the recovery operations are undoing the crime scene.”
Friday’s attacks also raised new questions about the State Department’s efforts to ensure security at its embassies. Thomas Pickering, undersecretary of state for political affairs, noted that both of the buildings attacked on Friday’s blasts were not at the department’s highest level of security.
A panel recommended $3.5 billion in security improvements for U.S. embassies worldwide in 1985, but only one-third of that amount was funded by Congress.
The panel was formed in response to a car-bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in 1984 and a barracks bombing there in 1983, which killed 241 U.S. Marines.
By late Saturday, suspects in the twin bombings included several Middle East figures with a record of past terrorist attacks or public threats against American targets.
One of them is Osama Bin Ladin, the son of a wealthy Saudi construction magnate who has been bankrolling fundamentalist Islamic terrorist cells. Bin Ladin is the primary suspect in several other attacks on U.S. posts, including the 1996 Khobar Towers attack.
Bin Ladin, who is believed to be in Afghanistan, has recently threatened to attack U.S. civilian and military personnel in the Persian Gulf region.
