How merchants of death plotted US Embassy bombing

Tragic as it was, the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi by the al-Qaeda came as an afterthought.

The original plan was for al-Qaeda to use Nairobi as an exploratory base to set up a full-fledged base in Somalia.

On falling out with the Americans in late 1980s, al-Qaeda founder and key financier, Osama bin Laden, was desperate to find a new sanctuary away from Afghanistan where, with help of the United States, he had waged a guerrilla war against the Soviets who had invaded the country a decade earlier.

At the time, his war machine was a force of Islamist fighters, the Mujahidin.

On leaving Afghanistan, bin Laden’s first stop was Sudan where he set himself up as a businessman with a giant Khartoum-based pharmaceutical company as his flagship. As he bided his time, an opportunity beckoned with the 1991 disintegration of Somalia after the ouster of President Siad Barre.

Bin Laden dispatched his exploratory team to Nairobi in early 1993. Working under the code-name, Africa Corps, and holed up in the Kenyan capital, the team led by Mohamed Atef, a bin-Laden operative from the Mujahidin, drew up a plan to make Somalia the key operational base for al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden’s strategists envisaged Somalia as a perfect base from which to attack US interests in the strategic Gulf region.

But with time, the plans to make the country the main al-Qaeda bastion were dropped. Instead, Somalia would be used as the base from which to launch assaults on US interests in the greater Horn of Africa region and elsewhere.

Under the new arrangement, the US Embassy in Nairobi was put at the top in the list. The US Embassy in Dar es Salaam was added later.

Immediate former CIA director George Tenet has said that the US Embassy in Nairobi had been identified as a target early in 1994.

In January, Fazul Abdullah Mohamed was picked as the key operative in the Nairobi plot. In early May of the same year together with one Sikander Juma, he rented a house in Nairobi’s New Runda Estate.

It would later serve as the bomb “factory” a few weeks before the Nairobi blast. Early in 1997, Fazul recruited three expert bomb makers and fraudulently worked their travel papers to enable them to enter Kenya.

They were Mohamed Saddiq Howaida aka Odeh, a Palestinian living in Jordan, Khalid Salim, a Yemeni, and Abdallah Nacha from Lebanon. The three came to Kenya as volunteers with Help Africa People on secondment from Mercy International Relief Agency, both based in Nairobi’s South C estate.

Raw materials

The next step was to bring raw materials into the country to make the bombs that exploded on August 7. 1998.

These included the bomb casings and about two tonnes of explosives. Between November 1997 and June 1998 entered Nairobi hidden under consignments of relief food imported by Help Africa People. The materials were then taken to Fazul’s safe house in New Runda.

With all raw materials in the country by the close of June 1998, Fazul embarked on the third phase of the project – obtaining the vehicle for ferrying the bomb to the embassy.

Early in July 1998, he and Khalid Salim purchased a two-tonne Toyota Dyna pick-up from a garage in Mombasa. Fazul wanted the vehicle modified to his specifications.

Ali Mahfoundh would later recount to investigators how two men with “Arab looks” drove to his garage in Majengo in July 1998, identified themselves as poultry farmers from Kikambala and requested that the vehicle be modified to cater for transportation of poultry products.

On August 2, 1998, Fazul hired a long-haul transporter to take the modified pick-up to Nairobi. It was offloaded at the NGOs office in Nairobi’s South C estate. The following day, the three bomb blast accomplices hired by Fazul--Odeh, Khalid and Nacha--were booked at a hotel on Accra Road.

On August 4, Fazul accompanied them on a final rehearsal for the D-Day in Nairobi streets. They rode a taxi up to the entrance of the embassy building on Moi and Halie Selaisse avenues and took pictures of the building.

On August 6, in an apparent move to throw everyone off scent, cartons of relief food were delivered to the hotel on Accra Road where the three men were staying.

It would later be discovered hat the cartons contained rice and powdered milk with a forwarding address to a refugee camp in Turkana district.

Cartons of rice

Early in the morning of August 7, 1998, the pickup was driven from South C to the hotel where it was loaded with some cartons of rice and milk. Closely following the car was a white Toyota salon owned by the NGO, Help Africa People.

In it were Odeh, Khalid, Nacha and Rashid al Owhali. At Runda, the relief food cargo was removed and the assembled bomb loaded.

And there and then the journey of death began.

In a confession to investigators, Khalid disclosed that Fazul personally drove the salon car followed closely by the pickup. “He seemed to know the route very well”, he confessed. Once there, Rashid disembarked from the salon car and followed the bomb-laden vehicle by foot as Fazul drove hurriedly away with Odeh, Khalid and Nacha.

The plan was to have the pickup force its way to the basement of the embassy building. When a security guard refused to lift the barrier gate, Rashid hauled a hand-grenade and took off on foot with the guard in hot pursuit.

The two were barely a few metres away when the bomb exploded. Both survived. They are still alive, one is working in Nairobi, the other is serving a life sentence in prison in the United States.