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Compensation Disparity Riles Victims of 1998 US Embassy Bombings

Salem Solomon

   WASHINGTON - Doreen Oport was on a tea break when she heard the blast.
   A 15-year employee of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi in 1998, she said she
   wasn't fazed by the sound at first. She thought it was a tire bursting
   on a busy street.

   Moments later she felt the unmistakable force of a detonation nearby.
   She would later learn that the first sound was a grenade, thrown at
   guards outside of the embassy. The second sound was a truck laden with
   explosives.

   "We all fell down, the embassy was in pitch darkness," Oport told VOA.
   "And we were pinned down on the debris of the embassy floor, with the
   bricks or whatever came from the roof and metal bars and we were pinned
   down there for hours. And then we started hearing some sounds like
   people were running and people were crying."

   The near-simultaneous attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and
   Tanzania on August 7, 1998, killed 224 people and injured more than
   5,000. They were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and executed by
   al-Qaida operatives, mostly harbored in Sudan.

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