Blast Victims’ Families Watch Trial With Pain, Confusion

For two days this week, Edith Bartley sat in a fortified courthouse, silently sizing up the shackled men accused of killing her father and brother in terrorist bombings at two American embassies.

Bartley had publicly lashed out at U.S. officials, accusing them of ignoring threats in the months before the 1998 attacks. But the four defendants themselves, she said, elicited other emotions--including bewilderment.

“I caught myself staring at a couple of them and thinking, ‘Why?’ ” Bartley said. “I’m so disconnected from their world. They were doing this for some cause I’ll never understand.”

The cause that took the lives of 12 Americans has become central to a closely watched federal trial in New York City. Authorities say the twin blasts at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were part of a worldwide terror plot against Americans engineered by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.

Julian Bartley, 55, the consul general in Nairobi, Kenya, and his son were among 224 people killed. About a dozen family members of the American dead have watched in the courtroom gallery as prosecutors wielded terms like jihad-- holy war--and fatwah--a religious decree--to explain what motivated Muslims to launch the attacks.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Butler described how the truck bomb that went off in the parking lot of the American embassy in Nairobi created a whirlwind of broken concrete, shattered glass and twisted steel.

“That’s only what the bomb did to buildings,” Butler said. “What it did to human beings that day defies description.”

The families later listened as Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl--a former terrorist who emerged as a key government witness--recalled that one of Bin Laden’s advisors offered his followers a religious justification for the slaughter of civilians.

“If they good person, they go to paradise,” Al-Fadl said. “If bad person, they go to Hell.”

For Robert Kirk Jr., the opening of the trial revived painful memories of the day he lost his wife, Arlene, a fiscal officer for the military attache.

“I was at home and she was at work,” said Kirk, also an embassy worker. After the bomb went off, “I went to see if she was safe. I saw the carnage and well . . .,” he said, his voice trailing off.

Mary Olds, whose daughter, Sherry, also perished in Nairobi, said she hopes justice will ease her sometimes paralyzing pain. “I’m not seeking vengeance, though sometimes I feel that way,” she said.

“You have no idea how hard it is to put one foot in front of the other these days,” she added. “I have basically become a recluse in my own home.”

Outside court, Edith Bartley and her mother, Sue, said they were troubled by Al-Fadl’s testimony that he warned embassy officials, and later the FBI, that Bin Laden’s terrorist organization might bomb an embassy.

Federal authorities have acknowledged they were cautioned about terrorist threats and lax security before the nearly simultaneous bombings. A commission appointed by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright criticized the State Department for not doing more to safeguard U.S. missions.

The Bartleys and other families have filed a $100-million claim against the U.S. government, alleging it withheld information about the dangers and demanding more protection for those in foreign service.