OWN CORRESPONDENT, Dar es Salaam | Sunday 9.30pm.
BALLISTIC experts have impounded a device suspected to have been used in mixing chemicals which formed the bomb that destroyed the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam on August 7, the Tanzanian Daily Mail has reported.
It is not known, however, whether the device was one of the items taken from a house in Dar es Salaam on Thursday in an FBI-led operation aimed at uncovering the place where the bomb was assembled.
Deputy Director of Criminal Investigation Mohamed Hanna would not comment, apart from confirming that the operation was still under way.
Information gathered from the neighbourhood indicated that no one was arrested during the raid, as the various tenants vanished a few days before and after the August 7 bomb blast.
The heavily-fenced house has been under 24-hour surveillance by the FBI and local police since Tuesday. On Thursday a Daily Mail reporter, Asterius Banzi, saw several items being removed from the house, but, he wrote, “it was difficult to determine their nature, as no one was permitted to get too close to the scene, except security officers”.
On a second visit later in the week, Banzi wrote, he “could see through holes in the fence that some people were doing some work inside the house, with their faces covered with masks. It is believed that they [are] ballistic experts who arrived in Tanzania recently from neighbouring Kenya, where they were doing a similar job.”
The bomb that wrecked the US embassy in Dar es Salaam occurred simultaneously with the one that tore through the Nairobi US embassy in Kenya, leaving over 250 people dead and about 5,000 casualties, from both incidents.