On Terrorism's Trail
How the FBI unraveled the Africa embassy bombings
In Kenya, Peter Mbuvi was the man the FBI needed. As deputy director of Kenya's Criminal Investigative Division, Mbuvi, a man of infectious enthusiasm, knew his country's criminal side intimately. But he knew the FBI only by reputation and worried how the Americans would view his CID. "They expected a developing country, maybe an inferior police force," he said. Mbuvi was determined to prove them wrong. His CID agents paired up with FBI agents, running raids and interrogation sessions together. He even gave the FBI space for its command post: a half-dozen utility tables thrown together in a spartan police conference room.
While FBI-CID teams fanned out across the city, Mbuvi's men had set up a hot line. From it came leads of all sorts: Some callers claimed to know the killers but, agents discovered, actually only wanted a free ticket to America, courtesy of the FBI. Others were more helpful. One tipster suggested police check out a suspicious fellow named Rashed Daoud al Owhali. When the CID found him, his face and hands were covered with cuts, and a large wound ran down his back. He claimed he was an innocent victim of the blast.
In Tanzania, where FBI agents also teamed up well with locals, differences quickly emerged. One Tanzanian commander told his FBI counterpart that American interrogators were simply too polite. "In our country, that is a disadvantage," he explained. "Our people understand force. . . . Now we're going to be a little more direct." But as in Nairobi, the Americans gained a growing respect for their partners. "They continually found evidence we overlooked," says Piernick.
In Dar es Salaam, Piernick found, the evidence even grew on trees. Visiting the bomb site, he was standing in the shade when a breeze jarred something loose from a branch above him. He looked down to find a piece of human flesh the size of a cigar. Up went investigators, who found the nearby trees littered with body parts, car pieces, and other potential evidence--blown there by the force of the bomb. Local cops had puzzled over the FBI's grisly work at collecting human remains; an agent finally showed them a portable X-ray machine the bureau had brought to examine pieces of flesh for bomb fragments. At the Nairobi morgue, victims' bodies were cut apart in the search for bomb components.
Big and crude. Eventually, from the rubble and elsewhere, 3 tons of materials were packed up, sealed, and shipped to the bureau's crime labs back home to be analyzed. Bomb experts, meanwhile, used computer models to reconstruct the blast. Their conclusions: The crude bombs that devastated the U.S. embassies each contained some 2,000 pounds of TNT. Investigators found blasting caps and traces of RDX--a plastic explosive--that were used as detonators. They also found bits of cylindrical tanks that held oxygen and acetylene, commonly used by Mideast terrorists with the mistaken belief they enhance an explosion. Similar blasting caps and explosive residue were later found at the home of Rashid Saleh Hemed, one of the suspects held by Tanzanian authorities.
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