Terror Strikes Again
Attacks on U.S. embassies prompt new fears--and a vow of retribution
First, Bill Barr heard a "thump." The American diplomat was meeting with other officials inside the ambassador's office on the fifth floor of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Ten seconds later, Barr said, there was "a hell of a blast. The windows blew in but the frames blew out." A Kenyan businessman ran out of a building a block away and looked skyward: "All you could see," he said, "was thousands of files flying through the air. It was nothing but paper, dust, and darkness." And blood.
At virtually the same moment--10:40 a.m. local time on August 7--a twin car bomb exploded outside the U.S. Embassy some 450 miles away in Dar es Salaam, capital of the neighboring East African country of Tanzania. Together, the bombings killed at least 81 people and injured more than 1,700 others. Among the dead were at least eight Americans in Nairobi and five local employees of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam.
Both embassies, though still standing, are structurally damaged and will probably have to be torn down. The Ufundi Cooperative House, a five-story office building that took the brunt of the Nairobi blast, was immediately reduced to a 50-foot-high pile of twisted metal and concrete, with many bodies underneath.
President Clinton vowed retribution. "We will use all the means at our disposal to bring those responsible to justice, no matter what or how long it takes," he said in the White House Rose Garden a few hours after the blasts.
But investigators are still trying to determine exactly what happened, beginning with the mysterious thump heard by Barr, who is director of the U.S. Information Service in Kenya. He thinks it may have been a grenade thrown at the embassy. Eyewitnesses also said there was gunfire outside the Nairobi embassy just before the big explosion. Julius Koyiet, a Kenyan Christian preacher, was grazed by a bullet that made two holes--entry and exit--in the arm of his loose shirt. He told U.S. News and Kenyan police that he saw four men of "Arab" appearance jump out of a yellow van parked behind the embassy, and one of them fired wildly into the crowd. "I thought it was a robbery because it was next to the bank," Koyiet said.
The Arab connection is extremely tenuous. Since there were no credible claims of responsibility for the bombings, and no specific warnings were received in advance, the U.S. State Department refused to speculate about who the bombers might be. But terrorism experts said that the most likely suspects are well-established terrorist groups from outside Kenya and Tanzania who chose those countries because of lax security and, possibly, their proximity to the Middle East. "This appears to have been a very well coordinated, very well planned attack--clearly not the work of amateurs," said National Security Council spokesman P. J. Crowley.
Since the end of the cold war deprived terrorists of Soviet funding and havens in Eastern Europe, incidents of international terrorism have actually been on the wane. In 1996, there were 296 acts of international terrorism--a 25-year low, according to the State Department. Last year, the number rose slightly, to 304.
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