U.S. Team Discounts Truck’s Role in Bombing

The investigation into last week’s bombing at the U.S. Embassy here has cast doubt on the presumption that the deadly explosives were planted on a water delivery truck, top U.S. officials said Thursday.

But investigators are hard pressed to find another explanation for the blast.

“We’re assuming we are looking at a bomb; how it got there we don’t know,” a senior State Department official said. “There was a bomb in the vicinity of the truck, but it still has to be determined how it was carried.”

In the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, meanwhile, where a bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy killed more than 250 people and injured more than 5,000, authorities said they had discovered pieces of the vehicle used in the attack. Unlike in the Tanzanian capital, witness accounts in Nairobi have clearly pointed to a bomb transported in a covered pickup truck.

“We have identified numerous motor vehicles that were in the blast, some of them terribly damaged,” said Sheila Horn, head of the FBI’s operation in Kenya. “We have been successful, we think, in identifying certain parts of the delivery vehicle.”

The senior State Department official in Dar es Salaam said the sophistication of the two attacks, within minutes of each other, indicates detailed planning and preparation, probably about six months in advance of the blasts.

The synchronized timing, if intentional, could also suggest the bomb was not aboard the water truck because its delivery schedule was unpredictable and there was no way of knowing with certainty when it would be away from the embassy.

The truck took water from the embassy’s underground storage tank to the homes of U.S. staff where city water often runs dry.

“It takes one hour normally to do one round, but it depends on the amount of water used at the houses,” said Mohammed Mganda, dispatcher for the embassy’s motor pool. “Between 7:30 and 10:30 a.m., [the truck] could take two or three trips.”

The water truck had just pulled up to the embassy’s front gate when the blast occurred at 10:39 a.m. last Friday. Ever since then, the truck has been at the center of the investigation into the attack, which killed 10 people here, including the truck’s driver. The driver’s assistant also is believed to be dead, although his body has not been found.

The vehicle was thrown against the side of the embassy building by the force of the explosion, which also left a large crater in the driveway where the truck had been stopped for a routine inspection by security guards.

But the truck’s 1,800-gallon tank survived the blast mostly intact, and extensive damage to the cab could have been caused by a fuel tank explosion and not the bomb, experts said.

“I think it is just a dead end,” a senior U.S. security official said of the theory that the water truck was transporting the bomb.

Because of the size of the blast--it left a 12-foot-wide crater in the embassy’s drive--investigators suspect the explosives were too big to have been strapped to a suicide bomber.

In addition, there is no evidence so far that the bomb was packed in another vehicle, perhaps hidden behind the water truck--what some bomb experts say is the most plausible explanation. There were more than 20 cars destroyed or damaged on the road leading to the embassy, so investigators say it is too early to know the origin of all the scattered car parts.

“It had to be in a vehicle to do the kind of damage that it did,” said a former U.S. government counter-terrorism expert, adding that the vehicle could have been destroyed beyond recovery.

Kenneth Piernick, who oversees the FBI investigation here, would not confirm that attention has shifted from the water truck itself. Asked if investigators believe the bomb was on the truck, he replied: “The bomb detonated above that crater. That is all that I will say.”

In Washington, FBI officials said Thursday that it will take them at least four more weeks to complete their painstaking collection of evidence at the blast sites in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the hundreds of interviews that they intend to conduct.

The bureau has 215 agents, forensic and explosive experts and other personnel in Kenya and Tanzania.

Sensitive evidence from the locations--including bomb residue and smaller pieces of wreckage--is to begin arriving in Washington on a cargo plane from Africa this weekend for examination at the FBI’s state-of-the-art criminal laboratory, officials said.

“The effort, I think, is going to be an arduous one,” Donald M. Kerr, assistant director of the FBI laboratory division, said in a briefing. “It’s the small pieces that matter. It’s the residues that matter. So we’re working through that puzzle at the present time.”

Thomas J. Pickard, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division, said the bureau and local authorities intend to interview more than 700 individuals in Nairobi, where the embassy is located in the bustling center of the city, and about 200 in Dar es Salaam, where the embassy is in a residential area.

“We estimate it will take at least four more weeks to complete the examination at both sites, and we still have interviews, and from that we will develop leads,” Pickard said.

He said the FBI had not orchestrated the arrest of any of those held in the two countries, and he would not characterize anyone as a suspect. He said that some of those individuals had subsequently been released but declined to be more specific.

Under a measure passed by Congress in 1986, murder of a U.S. citizen abroad is a capital crime, said Robert M. Blitzer, chief of an FBI counter-terrorism section. “There’s quite a bit of federal jurisdiction in the case.”

Pickard, however, said that it was not certain where any individuals charged with the bombings would be tried. “They could prosecute them there. Then, if we have an extradition treaty or whatever, we could bring them back here to the United States as we have brought back others. Sometimes the government says, ‘We don’t want to try them; we think they should be tried in America,’ and we get the opportunity to bring them back.”

Material from Kenya and Tanzania will be sent to the United States on separate flights to avoid mixing the evidence in any way, officials said.

Kerr declined to speculate on the nature of the explosives until the laboratory evidence provides a definitive answer.

Murphy reported from Dar es Salaam and Miller from Washington.