The Missing Haunt Kenyan Families

Elijah Ngito Owino, who worked as a payroll clerk in one of the buildings in downtown Nairobi destroyed by a terrorist bomb, is missing.

Two months ago, his wife, Zena Ngito, died of malaria.

Their two children, Calvin Biko, 9, and Michelle Ngito, 8, understand that their mom is gone. But they keep asking, “Where’s Daddy?”

Ten days after bombs aimed at U.S. embassies rocked Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 250 people and wounding more than 5,000, the rolls of the missing remained incomplete--and their uncertain families anxious and forlorn.

“I feel very bad,” Calvin said Monday in the living room of the family’s one-bedroom apartment. He sighed. “No one has told us the whereabouts of our father.”

It is of little consequence to the families of the missing that, for instance, Pakistani authorities arrested a suspect in the bombing, packed him off to Kenya and said over the weekend that he had confessed--or that Kenyan and American officials said Monday that he had confessed to nothing.

“What he has done or not done can’t be undone,” Mercy Nyambura Muriuki, 25, said. Her younger sister, 21-year-old Alice Waruguru Muriuki, had just started work a couple of months ago as a drugstore clerk in the high-rise two doors down from the embassy in Nairobi, hoping to earn enough money to go to secretarial school. She hasn’t been seen since Aug. 7.

No one knows precisely how many people are missing. Authorities, who have largely been consumed until this week with such pressing tasks as identifying the dead, have relied on relatives to file missing person reports.

Stanley Mgugi, who helps trace missing people for the Kenyan Red Cross, said this weekend that he had six such reports. An official at the National Disaster Fund Information Center, which has set up shop in a tent in Nairobi’s downtown Uhuru Park next to oversize signboards listing names of the dead, said Monday that he knew of three missing people.

“Many others are probably missing,” he said. “Nobody really knows.”

The uncertainty is due in part to the ferocity of the Nairobi car bomb, which savaged the backside of the embassy, flattened the five-story Ufundi Cooperative House next door and roared into the Cooperative Bank tower next to that, shattering windows more than 20 stories up.

The ensuing fire burned bodies beyond recognition. As of Monday, the city mortuary’s office still held 44 bodies, many of them charred; nonetheless, officials said they had finally succeeded in identifying all of the 44 but one.

“The front part of him is not there,” said Jacob Nyongesa, an aide to the mortuary director, of the unidentified victim. “There is no face.”

In addition, the location--and timing--of the explosion were guaranteed to produce maximum confusion. The embassy is at one of the busiest intersections in Nairobi’s central business district, which has nonstop auto and truck traffic; also, the city’s rail station is about a block away. It was a busy Friday morning, made busier by an ongoing bank strike that increased pedestrian traffic, with crowds on the hunt for a place to cash a check.

Holding On to Hope

And, of course, there’s human nature: Many relatives are finding it profoundly difficult to give up hope. After 10 days, even the most hopeful said that they recognized the odds of someone magically appearing were, to be gentle, not good. But, without a body, death simply does not seem real--not even possible to comprehend.

“This is too much for us,” Mercy Nyambura Muriuki said, biting her lip to stave off tears.

Lorin Mimless, a New York-based psychiatrist who has been working as a volunteer doctor in Kenya since October, said such an experience would be traumatic for anyone--but is especially so for Kenyans who because of tribe or ethnicity engage in distinct burial rituals.

“For many Kenyans, missing the body is especially traumatic and remarkable because the body is the thing that goes in the ground and they all stand around the grave site, each person putting dirt on the coffin,” Mimless said. “That’s closure.

“Without that, there’s only frustration.”

There’s also a practical matter, said Mimless, who has been counseling some of the U.S. Embassy’s Kenyan employees since the blast. Without a body, there’s little hope of getting a government-issued death certificate; without the certificate, survivors may not be eligible for benefits.

“One family reported to me last week that they wanted to claim a body just to have a body,” Mimless said. After thinking about it awhile, he said, they realized that “was not a good idea.” But they “were ready to claim a body, any body.”

Unlike the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, the one in Dar es Salaam was not in a commercial area. That helped reduce the number of deaths, injuries and missing people.

The Kenyan blast killed at least 247 people; the Tanzanian, 10. Early reports that passersby may have been killed on the shady residential road outside the main entrance to the embassy in Dar es Salaam have since been found to be untrue, Tanzanian officials said Monday.

But there is one person whose disappearance continues to confound authorities in Tanzania--Saidi Rogati, 49, a worker in the embassy’s motor pool. “There is no single trace of him,” Raphael Hokoro, a Tanzanian spokesman, said Monday.

U.S. investigators thought they had stumbled across Rogati’s remains last week when they were combing debris for clues and came across what they thought were “small parts of body all over the place,” one U.S. official said. But the substance was not human remains.

“It is not unusual to have missing people in situations like this who are never accounted for,” a senior U.S. State Department officer in Dar es Salaam said. The 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, for instance, left six Americans missing.

Sometimes, authorities do account for everyone, but it takes time. The last three bodies pulled out of the rubble of the Oklahoma City federal building were not found until May 29, 1995, about six weeks after it was bombed April 19. Even then, those three were not recovered until after what remained of the structure had been demolished.

Since Rogati’s remains have not been found, there has been speculation--so far unsubstantiated--that he was somehow involved in the blast. Why else would he be the only person unaccounted for?

Rogati’s family won’t hear of it. He had worked at the embassy for 13 years, relatives said, noting that four children, three grandchildren and a string of other relatives were dependent on his $390 monthly salary. To top it off, they said, Rogati had no passport, was a devout Christian and lived a simple life.

“We went to the hospital and checked through the wards, and I have been to the mortuary three times trying to identify a body,” said his brother, Nanguku Saidi, sitting on a wooden stool beneath a dusty palm tree near the family’s outdoor kitchen. “Nothing.”

‘She Was Not There’

In Nairobi, Gloria Wangechi Wachira’s relatives made the rounds of the hospitals and the mortuary again Monday, searching for the 26-year-old woman. She worked in a bank in the Ufundi Cooperative House.

“We even checked the people who were quite burned like charcoal in the mortuary,” her aunt, 45-year-old Anne Muthoni, said. “Her mother looked at people’s teeth. She said she would know her daughter’s teeth.

“She was not there.”

Elijah Ngito Owino worked in the Ufundi building. Typically, he would arrive home each evening about 6; the day of the blast, his two children stayed up until midnight waiting for him.

The next day, 8-year-old Michelle walked out to the bus stop at the main road, where she stayed all day, checking every person getting off every bus.

Her 9-year-old brother, who reads well, has since been checking the local newspapers each day for word about his father. However, he has been spending most of his time in the family’s bedroom; there, aunt Margaret Odanga said Monday, he keeps staring at his parents’ pictures. Odanga, their father’s sister-in-law, has been caring for the children along with their maternal grandmother.

“We’re just waiting,” Calvin said, refusing to lift his eyes from the floor. “We don’t know what will happen.”

Times staff writer Dean E. Murphy in Dar es Salaam contributed to this report.