Rescuers scrabbled at mountains of shattered and twisted concrete

Four-storey offices blitzed in Nairobi

FIRST A loud bang and then a thick plume of smoke rose hundreds of feet into the air. After a moment of silence, glass and masonry rained down from the sky.

This was the scene in central Nairobi yesterday as a huge car bomb aimed at the United States embassy ripped through the morning rush hour.

Two buildings caught the full force of the blast - the US embassy and, behind it, Ufundi Co-op House, which contains a secretarial college and offices.

Ufundi House collapsed, floor by floor, crushing its occupants. The embassy's reinforced, five-storey structure survived but its rear-facing rooms were reduced to blackened shells.

Minutes later office workers, cut by glass, were streaming away from the area of the blast and a trail of blood led back to the US embassy.

In Kenya, politics and civil disturbance often go hand in hand, but the shock visible on the faces of office workers staggering away from the blast signalled violence of a different order. Six buses, gutted by the blast, had halted on Haile Selassie Avenue. The driver of one had been thrown, dead, halfway through his shattered window.

At the rear of the embassy rescue workers started to stack the remains of about 15 people who had caught the full force of the explosion.

One charred and blackened body looked more like a series of logs removed from a fire than a middle-aged female.

Some lacked faces or limbs or clothes. Others seemed to have swollen.

The bodies were stacked haphazardly on to the backs of trucks and carted away.

"I have seen eight dead white people being pulled out of the US embassy and 25 other corpses [from Ufundi house]," said Amir Hassam, a rescue worker with the Aga Khan Social Welfare Board.

Eda Rubia, a management consultant, was walking near the embassy when the blast happened. "I heard a loud bang then the whole place was shaking and within a split second glass was falling on my head."

Simon Tafei, a messenger, said: "It was strange ... a big bang and then I was lying on the floor. All around me were people, bleeding."

The rescue effort began within minutes. As US embassy personnel pulled out casualties and tried to compile a list of their missing, hundreds of volunteers swarmed over Ufundi House.

Mounted police, riot police, firemen in heat-protective suits, workers from the Red Cross, the Kenya Wildlife Service and aid agencies, business people and passers-by all threw themselves into the effort.

At first there was one survivor for every corpse pulled from the rubble. One US marine carried the body of an employee out of the embassy basement. Minutes later a cheer went up as a man was pulled from a hole in the fourth floor of Ufundi House.

He was strapped to a stretcher and manhandled down two long ladders to a waiting ambulance and still had the strength to raise his head and shout. "God is great. God is great," he yelled, his arms held out in a gesture of victory after having been trapped for more than three hours.

But the early successes could not dispel the grim fact that no survivors were being pulled from the lower floors of Ufundi House.

More than 500 of the casualties were taken to Nairobi's Kenyatta National Hospital, which made an urgent appeal for blood donors and volunteer medical workers. Dozens of general practitioners, retired nurses and foreign aid workers converged on the hospital to help.

President Daniel Arap Moi arrived at the hospital in the afternoon to visit some of the injured.

"The response has been fantastic," said Julius Meme, Kenya's director of medical services. "People have been donating blood, blankets, everything."

A woman awaiting treatment for cuts on her face and arms said: "I heard a big sound and went to check what was happening at the door. But when I got there I was thrown to the floor.

"I reached the street and ran with the others. I saw I was bleeding from my head, my hands, everywhere."

Scores of others in blood-soaked clothes, their faces raked with lacerations, sat dazed waiting their turn for treatment amid the chaos. In corridors, reception areas and in the open air, nurses and volunteers stitched and bandaged the wounded.

Mr Moi issued a statement condemning the attack and said the authorities would do anything possible "to bring the perpetrators of the heinous crime to book".

Kenya has rarely been the scene of urban violence of this sort.

In 1979 the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi was flattened by an explosion which killed several tourists. A shadowy Arab group claimed responsibility, saying it was in retaliation for Kenya allowing Israeli troops to refuel in Nairobi during their raid on Uganda's Entebbe airport to rescue hostages from a hijacked aeroplane.