/ 10 August 1998

Nairobi: hopes of finding more survivors fade

OWN CORRESPONDENT, Johannesburg | Sunday 9.00PM.

HOPES of finding further survivors in the rubble remaining after the massive bomb blast which shook Nairobi on Friday are fading.

The death toll now stands at 164, with 4000 injured. Forty people are still missing, including 12 young women from the secretarial college in Ufundi House, the building next to the United States embassy that collapsed in the blast.

Three people trapped in the rubble were still known to be alive late on Sunday, with desperate rescue efforts concentrated on trying to reach them.

Earlier on Sunday the wife of a caretaker and her son were freed after 36 hours, and walked away shaken but otherwise unhurt.

Church services were held around Kenya on Sunday for the victims of the bombing.

Services were also held in neighbouring Tanzania, where a bomb that exploded almost simultaneously at the US embassy in Dar es Salaam on Friday morning killed nine and injured 60.

American FBI investigators are at the scenes of both bombings, but are not permitted to comment on their findings so far.

An unknown Egyptian Islamic group, the Army for Liberating Islamic Sanctuaries, has been reported by an Arab newspaper to have claimed responsibility for the bombing. However speculation about who is responsible has focused on Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian billionaire and dissident living in Afghanistan. Osmana is known to have links to various extremist Islamic groups, including the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad, and has been named by the US as the prime suspect in the 1995 car bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans, and the June 1996 blast at a military complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in which 19 US servicemen died.

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