At the edge of a flower bed, Beatrice Odhiambo sat hunched on the lawn of the city morgue Monday, silently contemplating the complex twists of fate that have changed her life.
She had come to retrieve the body of her husband, Timothy. The public works employee was killed when a bomb exploded Friday outside the U.S. Embassy, leveling a nearby building where he was trying to get a refund from a bank because of an error in his government paycheck.
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He had gone to the bank Wednesday, but a clerk told him to come back Friday at 10 a.m. His wife said Odhiambo, the sole breadwinner for three families, must have been in line at the bank 40 minutes later when the bomb exploded next door.
“Only God knows what we will do now,” said Odhiambo, waiting in line to remove his corpse from a room stacked with bodies.
She might have been speaking for thousands of Kenyans in the wake of the worst terrorist attack to strike this center of East African life. Its fallout will be felt by Kenyans long after the last survivor is saved and the last body recovered.
Health officials worry about having enough counseling for those who lost family members and had to identify mutilated remains. In a nation with a teetering economy, high unemployment and few welfare programs, many of the 5,000 injured will deal alone with lost eyes and other physical handicaps. Extended families will struggle to replace precious paychecks lost.
As Kenyans flock to donation centers to give blood for the injured, doctors quietly worry about screening standards in a nation struggling, like most African countries, to control the AIDS virus.
“It will be a long time before people forget,” said Terry Jumba, a mother searching the city’s hospitals for signs of her 18-year-old son, Bradley. “We’re not only crying for our own children but for everybody.”
Rescue crews at the bomb site were encouraged Monday by the sounds of tapping within the rubble. The flurry of activity at the city’s morgues and hospitals continued non-stop Monday. The death toll was put at 202 as rescue workers pulled body after body from the rubble of the Ufundi Co-op House next to the embassy.
In Washington, U.S. officials offered a $2 million reward for information leading to the arrest of those responsible for Friday’s nearly simultaneous blasts in the Kenyan and Tanzanian capitals. Meanwhile, officials from the CIA and FBI were evaluating other leads in Nairobi, including reports from witnesses who may have seen a truck that carried the bomb. There also was a report of a terrorist manifesto delivered in Cairo that praised Saudi financier Osama bin Laden, identified as a possible suspect, and reports that intelligence organizations had received vague warnings that an Islamic terrorist group might be planning an attack in Kenya.
Meanwhile, Israel Army radio said investigators suspect a plastic explosive, Semtex, was used in the blast. If the bomb was made of the Czech-manufactured explosive, it could lead the investigators toward a network of known terrorist groups.
In Tanzania, police questioned the first detained suspects, though investigators later warned against rushing to judgment about the suspects’ importance to the case.
Assistant Police Commissioner Wilson Mwansasu announced that “there were some suspects arrested . . . in different parts of Dar es Salaam,” Tanzania’s capital. The detainees were “connected to others,” he said, but he refused to elaborate.
In Washington, the State Department described the arrests as a “routine roundup.” Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice said about a dozen people had been detained for questioning in Dar es Salaam and advised reporters, “Don’t attach too much importance to it.”
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the administration and Congress would team up on a budget request to rebuild the U.S. diplomatic complexes in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and provide “essential security for posts around the world.”
Albright will leave Wednesday for Germany, where she will visit Americans and foreign nationals who were flown there for hospital treatment. She will return Thursday to Washington with the bodies of dead Americans.
In Nairobi, only a few bright moments shone through the mounting frustrations.
From his bed at the private Nairobi Hospital, Sam N’gan’ga related how he had spent 35 hours buried in the rubble before being rescued Saturday night. The scrap-metal dealer said that after the bomb blew him down the hall of the Ufundi building, into the dark corner of a collapsed stairwell, he shared encouragement with a seriously injured woman trapped nearby but out of sight.
“The last thing I said to her was, `I’m going now, and they’re coming for you.’ She asked why they weren’t coming for her first,” N’gan’ga said. “You didn’t know if it was day or night. You think about death. You think about another bomb coming.”
Rescuers were still searching Monday for the other trapped victim, known as Rose. Some believed they heard her tapping in the morning, though they hadn’t heard her voice since Sunday.
At Nairobi’s city mortuary, as many as three bodies were piled on each slab of a row of concrete slabs, some with names penciled on paper around their ankles. Others had just a numbered tag hanging from a toe.
“We’ve been here since Friday. It’s horrible,” said Enok Alumasi, a police bomb expert fingerprinting bodies that couldn’t be identified.
Beatrice Odhiambo was spared the shock that others faced: Her husband barely looked injured, save for the blood running from his ears. Others unfortunate enough to find the bodies of family members in such a place were devastated by what they saw.
Dominick Otieno died only three months after starting work at the bank and only two months after getting married, his brother-in-law John Nyagowa said outside the morgue. Otieno’s father had died recently, and his paycheck also was supporting his widowed mother.
Grace Kimani and Joyce Muangi were searching for their neighbor, Daniel Cheruiyot, who they described as “more than a brother.” They lingered at the gate to the morgue, trying to decide where to go next to find the college-trained surveyor who supported his young family and those of four unemployed brothers on a little more than $100 a month.
“It has been three days,” Kimani said. “He’s not in any of the hospitals. This is the last place to look.”
Rev. John Mungai, an apostolic minister, showed up at the morgue for a third straight day to wait for the body of his daughter, Margaret Wangiru, 20. She had been in class at the secretarial college at the Ufundi building Friday morning.
Having seen the condition of the flattened building, he had given up hope of finding her alive, though he insisted on describing her height, eye color and braided hair to anyone who might have seen her. He said Monday that he planned on staying until the morgue closed.
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“I can’t sleep at night. I have the same dream every night of how she is crying for help but there is no one to assist her,” Mungai said. “I believe I will see her again in heaven. I can forgive but I don’t think God will unless these people repent.”
At Kenyatta National Hospital, the only large public medical facility in Nairobi, doctors had treated 1,500 people, admitted 176 and pronounced 14 dead. Among the worst of their work, however, was treating 60 patients who had severe eye injuries.
Many victims described running to windows to see what was happening after hearing a first small blast. It was then that the larger bomb detonated, and the result, doctors said, was perforated eyes, ruptured and fractured orbits and severe eyelid lacerations.
“Many of them are still confused. It’s difficult to explain to them that they will not see again,” said Dr. Tami Aboubakary, a Cameroonian studying ophthalmology at the hospital.
One of the injured was Francis Kariyuki, 39, a car mechanic who had driven a friend to the 21-story Cooperative House building two doors down from the embassy. He was sitting in the car when he heard sounds “like a gun” and then felt himself being thrown out of the vehicle.
His eyes were penetrated with glass, likely from his car windshield. Both eyes were removed, and he now lies in a hospital bed with thick white bandages over his face. No one in his family knew where he was, and he groped under the mattress for his wallet so he could give the phone number of a friend to a visitor.
He said he hadn’t thought about how he would cope until asked by the visitor.
“Tsssk,” he said, turning his head as if to look away. “I cannot tell you now. The only thing I’m praying for is my recovery.”
Outside, dazed mothers and friends scanned long lists posted in the hospital windows with the names of admitted patients. Among those listed were simply “Unknown African child” or “Unknown African man.”
The names of Terry Jumba’s son Bradley and her sister’s two children were not on the lists at Kenyatta or any other hospital. The three teenagers had been at missionary schools near the Ugandan border and had boarded buses Thursday that were supposed to bring them home for a holiday, dropping them off Friday morning near the U.S. Embassy.
They still hadn’t been heard from by Monday morning.