Second anniversary of embassy blast

Monday, 7 August, marks two years since the devastating twin bomb blasts at the US embassies in Nairobi and the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, which killed 224 people and wounded over 5,000, besides causing millions of dollars’ worth of property damage. Two years on, compensation claims from the US are still pending and according to a report in the ‘EastAfrican’ weekly on Monday “the US will likely argue that it cannot be judged responsible for an action carried out by terrorists in a foreign country”. Meanwhile, a memorial ceremony was held in Nairobi on Sunday with survivors “easily identifiable” by their “scarred faces, white canes, wheelchairs, crutches and hearing aids”, local press reports said. The climax of the two-hour ceremony was a moving account of the suffering by survivors, friends and relatives of the victims. On Monday, the current US ambassador to Kenya, Johnnie Carson, said his government would continue to help the victims. He was addressing hundreds of people at the former US embassy site in downtown Nairobi where the blast ripped through buildings in the area. His predecessor, Prudence Bushnell, was injured in the explosion. He described the incident as “an act of indiscriminate violence...against our principles of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of religion.” ‘The EastAfrican’ commented however that “little evidence exists to show that Nairobi - East Africa’s biggest city - has improved in disaster preparedness”. As a result, private organisations have moved substantially more quickly than government agencies to put in place mechanisms aimed at responding to disasters and emergencies, the newspaper noted.