NAIROBI: Just after 10:30 on a sunny August morning in downtown Nairobi, 48-year-old Ali Mwadama was walking towards a bank opposite the US embassy, a cheque in hand.

He was less than 50 metres from the embassy on August 7, 1998 when a truck bomb detonated, transforming the normally bustling business district into a war zone.

It was Osama Bin Laden’s announcement to the world that his Al Qaida was a global threat: a coordinated bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and neighbouring Tanzania.

The two bombings killed 258 people and injured around 5,000 — mostly African citizens, the majority in Nairobi.

Three years later, Al Qaida would conduct its most notorious attack, flying passenger planes into New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 people.

Mwadama does not remember who pulled him out of the rubble, bleeding from a gash in his neck caused by a flying shard of glass. He recalls hearing screams and ambulance sirens.

People in blood-soaked clothing were carried on makeshift stretchers past what was left of the embassy.

He lost two friends that day, his livelihood as a voice-over artist and public speaker, and the cheque he was going to cash, earned for voicing a Coca-Cola ad aired during the 1998 football World Cup.

Twenty years later, he struggles to turn his head to the left. A scar runs from the below the grey hair on the back of his head to the bottom of his ear.

Other scars run deeper.

“Wherever I go, wherever I sit, I am so afraid of anything that could attack me,” he told Reuters, holding a photograph taken of him after the attack.

In it, he stares blankly at a wall, a bloody bandage covering his 26 stitches, his three children watching with concerned expressions.

Thunderous bang

Civil servant Julie Ogoye was talking to a colleague in their fourth floor Nairobi office when she heard a strange noise outside.

“I think I only went two steps, then I heard a very loud thunderous bang,” she said. “And what I saw was a silverish white cloud moving up.” That was the last thing she saw in a long time.

For a few seconds there was silence. Then came the groans.

Ogoye got up, helped by a colleague, and stumbled in blindness over debris and what she later learnt were dead bodies.

“When I lifted my hand and put it on the socket, I noticed it was an empty socket. My eyeball was hanging at the nose area,” she recalled. The shock made her pass out.

Her sight partially returned in her right eye. The left socket was filled with a prosthesis.

Ogoye is not eager to forget.

At the weekend, she visited the former site of the embassy, now the August 7th Memorial Park.

“This park. It was rubble and blood and a stinking place, but they have transformed it into a beautiful place,” she said.

“To me it is symbolic. Bad things can happen, but good things conquer bad things.”

Meanwhile, US Ambassador to Kenya Robert Godec at a Nairobi gathering said: “Twenty years ago today, evil showed its terrible face in Kenya and Tanzania”.

“In the middle of a busy Friday morning, Al Qaida terrorists exploded bombs outside the US embassies here in Nairobi and in Dar es Salaam.”

“In an awful moment, the lives of thousands changed forever as did the lives of their families and friends,” he added.

The Nairobi Chamber Choir performed the Kenyan and American national anthems, then participants held candles while the names of the victims were read out to the sound of a solo violin.

“On that day, the perpetrator’s — Al Qaida — appetite and ambition for large-scale attacks grew,” said Martin Kimani, head of Kenya’s National Counter Terrorism Centre.

“Since then, large parts of the world have endured repeated attacks by terrorists,” he added.

— With inputs from AFP