Hope Dies Along With a Woman Named Rose

Several suspects were detained Wednesday in connection with the bombing of the U.S. Embassy here, even as rescue crews ended a round-the-clock search for survivors after unearthing the body of “Rose”--a Kenyan who had become a symbol of hope for this grief-stricken nation.

The government said in a brief statement only that “a number of people” had been detained and were being questioned about the blast last week that killed at least 250 people--including 12 Americans--and injured more than 5,000 in Nairobi.

Ten people died in an almost simultaneous explosion at the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; 14 people have been detained by the Tanzanians.

The statement by Kenyan authorities Wednesday gave no further details about those detained here, and officials refused to comment.

U.S. officials were cautious. “I think we are just going to have to see what comes from these arrests and who these people are,” one American official said.

Another U.S. official in Washington was quoted by news agencies as saying without elaboration that two of the detainees “are considered suspects.”

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright traveled to Germany on Wednesday to visit some of those wounded in the African blasts and to accompany the bodies of 10 Americans that are to be returned to the United States. One American victim was to be buried in Kenya and another had already been returned to the United States.

“I go determined that those responsible for these cowardly crimes will be held accountable,” Albright said. “I go secure in the knowledge that America will never be intimidated or back down in the face of terrorism. . . .

“I’m bringing home very brave Americans, and this is a very hard trip,” she said.

President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will meet the aircraft today for a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The first military planeload of injured arrived late Wednesday at Andrews. Several were transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center.

In Kenya, U.S. officials continued their shovel-by-shovel search of the area for clues that will let them piece together the embassy attack and help identify the terrorists.

As dust particles permeated the air and backhoes dug through the last of the rubble, the FBI extricated what may be a key piece of evidence Wednesday--a vehicle plastered against the Nairobi embassy wall by the force of the blast. Forensic experts also used cotton balls to swab fences, walls and metal fragments at the site to capture possible traces of explosives.

A bulldozer pulled the wreckage off the wall, then hauled it across the street to a parking lot that the FBI has turned into a crime lab. A U.S. official in Washington said investigators believe that the vehicle carried the bomb to the site.

But Capt. Rhyl Jones, a British army demolition expert in Kenya who has been helping the Americans, said it is too early to tell whether the bomb was inside the vehicle, Associated Press said.

Even as investigators seemed to be making progress in their labors, rescue workers hit a deeply dispiriting moment when an Israeli team pulled Rose Wanjiku Mwangi from the rubble about 4 a.m. and determined she had been dead for at least 24 hours.

“We found a table over her head that helped her to stay alive,” said Col. Shalom Ben-Arieh. “But there were three stories [of the building] above her. There was no chance to rescue her.”

Clinton, Aides Huddle

In Washington, the president huddled Wednesday in the White House Situation Room with his top intelligence and national security advisors to get an update on the bombing investigations.

As attention shifts from rescue to the aftermath, Clinton pressed his staff to focus on lessons learned from the disaster, the need for security improvements and strategies for providing law enforcement agencies with the tools they need, national security spokesman P.J. Crowley said.

“We see terrorism as the emergent threat of the ‘90s. It will be the major threat that America faces globally into the next century,” he said.

Clinton requested a new assessment of risks to other U.S. diplomatic and military installations around the world in advance of a likely request for emergency funds from Congress to improve security and rebuild--in different locations--the two devastated embassies in East Africa.

“We’re asking our posts to evaluate their security measures. If there are things in light of these attacks that we can do, we’d like to do them,” Crowley said.

The White House is expected to ask Congress to enact a supplemental spending bill to address mission security. Republican leaders are expected to support a request. The issue of security of U.S. missions abroad also will be the focus of hearings by the House International Relations Committee next month.

All the deliberations in Washington will probably be swayed by the African attacks, especially with the revelation Wednesday that the U.S. ambassador in Kenya had warned of problems before last week’s blast.

Patrick J. Kennedy, assistant secretary of State for administration, acknowledged Wednesday that Prudence Bushnell, the U.S. ambassador in Kenya, repeatedly sought a new embassy in Nairobi, complaining that the existing structure was vulnerable to car bombs because it was too close to a busy street.

Kennedy said the department decided that, although Bushnell’s fears were well-founded, other building projects were higher on the priority list for limited money.

Bushnell first requested a new embassy in December. She renewed the appeal in a communication directed to Albright in April and to the undersecretary for management the following month.

Kennedy said that some security improvements were made in Nairobi but that they were inadequate to stop Friday’s car bomb. Even if the department had agreed to build a new embassy when Bushnell first raised the issue, he added, the work would have taken at least three years, so “we would still be in that embassy” when the bomb struck.

“We did the very best we could, given what we had,” Kennedy said. “New embassies cost a whole hell of a lot of money and take time to build.”

The Nairobi embassy is about 30 feet from the street. Under security guidelines adopted in 1984, diplomatic buildings must be set back at least 100 feet from the street, parking lot or any other place where non-embassy vehicles could go.

Besides Bushnell’s communications, Kennedy said, the Pentagon’s Central Command raised concerns about the embassy’s security.

Employee Is Missing

Still, Kennedy said there were more pressing needs elsewhere. “There are places where our embassy consists of a batch of trailers hooked together,” he said. He added that before Friday, Africa was not considered a high-risk area for terrorism.

In Dar es Salaam on Wednesday, a search continued for Saidi Rogati, 49, an employee of the U.S. Embassy there who is believed to have died in Friday’s blast but whose body has not been found.

“The family does not want to presume that he died in the explosion until we have found some proof that he died,” said a U.S. diplomat. “We wish to assist the family in locating any human remains on the scene.”

Fellow workers in the embassy’s motor pool, where Rogati has worked for about seven years, said Wednesday that Rogati was near the embassy’s front gate just before the explosion but had left the area to change a pair of wet trousers.

Normally, employees said, Rogati traveled with the embassy’s water truck, which had just arrived at the gate when the explosion occurred. The truck, which delivered water to the homes of U.S. employees in neighborhoods where city supplies are unreliable, has been identified by investigators as a “key aspect” of the probe.

As is sometimes the case, Rogati did not join the driver of the truck, Yusuf Shamte Ndange, on the early morning rounds last Friday, but was awaiting Ndange’s return, witnesses said. “Rogati told me he was waiting for the truck to take the second trip with the driver,” said Michael Raphael Simon, a motor pool employee.

Simon, who was interviewed Monday by the FBI, said investigators expressed no suspicions about Rogati’s involvement in the blast. Two members of Rogati’s family, interviewed at his home outside Dar es Salaam, said the FBI had not questioned family members about his disappearance.

As for Rose in Kenya, she had “put a name to a very anonymous disaster,” said Nina Galbe, a Red Cross spokeswoman. She “personified the hope that we all had to find at least one more person alive. Rose symbolized the whole rescue effort and gave us the strength to go on from day to day.”

A widow and mother of three, Rose had a job serving tea at Cooperative Merchant Bank inside the Ufundi Cooperative House--a building adjacent to the embassy that was collapsed by the blast.

Her mother, Gladys Mumbi Mwangi, a clinic assistant at Nairobi’s Pumwani Maternity Hospital, said she raced from her job when she heard a bomb had exploded in the building where her daughter worked. She was terrified that Rose, 36, might be injured.

Mwangi, 55, also a widow, first visited the hospitals in Nairobi on Friday and Saturday. Her heart sank Sunday when she read in the press that a woman known as Rose was still trapped in the debris and that rescue workers were trying to reach her.

“I did not believe that she was the one the press was talking about,” said Mwangi. “But when I didn’t find her in the mortuary or hospitals, I was only praying to God to keep her alive.”

Kennedy Njoroge, Rose’s 32-year-old brother, said that when he heard the embassy explosion, he rushed to the site and was distressed to find his sister’s workplace a heap of smoldering rubble.

He then dashed to Rose’s home on the outskirts of town, hoping to find her there. When she did not appear there, he too started to scour hospitals, then the mortuary.

He tried in vain to get any details about his sister’s fate from Sammy Nganga, the last victim to be pulled alive from the debris. Nganga had spoken to Rose while entombed in the ruins. But Nganga had just returned from surgery and doctors refused to let him talk.

Her family, ethnic Kikuyus from Kenya’s Central Province, finally learned of Rose’s death from a report on the Cable News Network on Wednesday morning.

“I was hopeful that she would come out alive,” said Gad Gikonyo, 22, Rose’s younger brother. “When she died, I became depressed.”

Sitting in their one-bedroom house in a working-class Nairobi suburb, Rose’s siblings described her as hard-working, determined and a born leader. “She was very jovial, friendly and social,” said Gikonyo. She will be most missed by her beloved children, two boys and a girl, ranging in age from 7 to 18, relatives said.

Her mother said she appreciated rescue workers’ labors.

Rescuers marked the end of their search with a ceremony at the blast site, where the American, French, Kenyan and Israeli flags flew at half-staff. Eight wreaths were laid on a pyramid of broken concrete, which Bushnell sprinkled with red roses.

“I feel relieved that we were able to help,” said Meital Hallawi, 19, an Israeli military rescue worker. “But I’m glad that we’re finally finished. . . . I hope nothing like this ever happens again.”

Times staff writers Marjorie Miller in Nairobi, Dean E. Murphy in Dar es Salaam, Robin Wright and Norman Kempster in Washington and special correspondent Elias Okach in Nairobi contributed to this report.