Surviving An Embassy Bombing

(AP)  Ambassador Prudence Bushnell was certain she was going to die as she descended the bloody stairwell of a building next door to a bombed U.S. embassy in Africa.

"There was blood everywhere on the banister. I could feel the person behind me bleeding onto me," Bushnell, then-U.S. ambassador to Kenya, testified Thursday. "I thought to myself the building was going to collapse ... and I was going to die."

Bushnell's testimony was the most dramatic so far in the 2-month-old federal trial of four men charged with bombing U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998. The nearly simultaneous blasts killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. Thousands were injured.

Along with her testimony in federal court, prosecutors on Thursday showed jurors a 25-minute video chronicling the destruction and carnage in Nairobi after the bomb hit.

Bushnell, now the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, provided a narrative as prosecutors showed jurors pictures of the destruction.

Jurors appeared shaken. One covered her mouth with both hands and shook her head as she saw limbless bodies and men in bloody suit coats hurling debris in a desperate search for survivors.

Bushnell testified that when she emerged from the high-rise, the streets were crowded with thousands of people amid broken glass and charred, twisted metal.

"I looked up and saw a burning vehicle. I saw the charred remains of what was once a human being," she said.

Bushnell said she was meeting with Kenya's minister of trade when she was thrown to the floor by the explosion. As he walked toward the window to look outside, there was a second blast. She suspects she blacked out and awoke in a shaky room where a tea cup rattled.

Then, she said, the tea cup went quiet.

"The only other person was a man face down on the floor. I thought he was dead," she said.

A colleague appeared and she left the room, spotting "someone's shoe and a great deal of blood. Then the enormity of the blast began to hit."

She followed a crush of people quietly descending a stairwell. Her lip was bleeding profusely.

"I had a lot of blood on me but was unsure which was my blood and which was the blood of other people," Bushnell said.

Then, Bushnell recalled, someone yelled, "Fire!"

"It was the second time that day I thought I was going to die," she said. Smoke bellowed up the stairwell.

During her testimony, Bushnell never looked directly at the four defendants Wadih El-Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohamed Sadeek Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali.

As jurors watched the 25-minute videotape, El-Hage, 40, sat with a hand over his mouth, and Mohamed, 27, rested his head in one hand and Odeh, 36, sat slumped in his chair. Al-'Owhali, 24, who allegedly rode in the bomb vehicle right up to the U.S. embassy guard gates in Nairobi, twirled a small black stick in his mouth.

If convicted of conspiracy, El-age and Odeh could face life in prison. Mohamed and Al-'Owhali could face the death penalty if found guilty of murder conspiracy.

Testimony resumes Monday.


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