Rush-Hour Blast In Nairobi Kills 2, Wounds Dozens

NAIROBI, June 11 -- A bomb exploded at a downtown bus stop here early Monday morning, killing two people, injuring more than 35 and sending out a shock wave that hurled glass, shrapnel and bodies into the air, witnesses and officials said. There was no immediate assertion of responsibility.

Police Commissioner Mohamed Hussein Ali said the explosion apparently came from something someone was carrying. Several witnesses reported various versions of a similar story: that a bag a man was holding -- some said it was paper, others said it was a backpack -- exploded in front of a cafe where a city bus bound for the airport had stopped.

"It was a man trying to get on the bus holding a paper bag," said David Mwangi, 35, who was having his shoes shined when the explosion sent shards of glass into his face and hand. "He himself looked like he disintegrated. I don't know what made me look."

Mwangi said the man shining his shoes was hurled at least six feet into the air.

The blast occurred during the morning rush hour on a busy downtown block of restaurants and shops anchored by the Ambassadeur Hotel, which serves a mostly Kenyan clientele. The block is bordered by Moi Avenue, a staging area for the city's large green buses, which are usually crowded with people.

People ducked and ran or limped away as ambulances, anti-terrorism police and bomb-sniffing dogs descended on the area. Investigators closed off two blocks and sifted through the detritus with gloved hands.

"I do not want to speculate if it is or is not" a suicide attack, Ali told reporters at the scene.

By early Monday afternoon, hundreds of curious passersby were clustered around the shuttered City Gate cafe, whose green metal doors were still smeared with blood. Blood pooled on the sidewalk between the cafe and the bus stop, and bits of paper and glass were scattered in an arc stretching at least 20 feet.

At Nairobi's Kenyatta National Hospital, which received 37 people injured in the blast, dazed victims lay on gurneys with their arms or heads bandaged. Others sat on benches along corridors, including a man left temporarily deaf by the explosion and another, Cyrus Mwirigi, who had been knocked unconscious.

"I was at the staging area waiting to take the bus to work" at the airport, said Mwirigi, 25. "Then I can't remember what happened."

Though Kenya is a relatively peaceful country, terrorists linked to al-Qaeda detonated a massive truck bomb at the U.S. Embassy here in 1998, killing more than 250 people just a few blocks from the site of Monday's blast. Suicide bombers attacked a hotel in the Kenyan coastal resort town of Mombasa in 2002.

Kenya shares a long border with Somalia, one of the most unstable countries on the continent, and suspicion concerning Monday's attack quickly fell on insurgents there, who are using roadside bombs and suicide attacks against the Ethiopian-backed Somali government that ousted a popular Islamic movement late last year.

Because Kenya supported the Somali government, rounding up dozens of Islamic fighters attempting to cross the border and shipping them to secret Ethiopian prisons, officials consider Kenya vulnerable to a retaliatory attack.

Suspicions also turned inward. A cultlike extortionist gang called the Mungiki has been terrorizing Nairobi's sprawling slums and surrounding areas in recent months, with some of its victims found beheaded.

In the past week, police launched a crackdown on suspected gang members, killing more than 30 people in the city's Mathare slum during raids that have drawn criticism from human rights groups.

In the absence of firm answers Monday, people worried and wondered who might be responsible.

"The whole thing is causing tension," said Fred Wabuko, 36, who was reading a newspaper near the site of the explosion. "People automatically suspect the Mungiki, or terrorism."

"We're used to theft around here," he added, "but not bomb blasts."