Stella Mwikali was on a tea break when she heard the blast.
A youthful employee of the co-operative Bank in Nairobi in 1998, she said she wasn’t fazed by the sound at first. She thought it was a tire bursting on a busy street.
Moments later, she felt the unmistakable force of a detonation nearby. She would later learn that the first sound was a grenade, thrown at guards outside of the embassy. The second sound was a truck laden with explosives.
“We all fell down on the floor was in pitch darkness,and we were pinned down on the debris of the embassy floor, with the bricks or whatever came from the roof and metal bars and we were pinned down there for hours. And then we started hearing some sounds like people were running and people were crying.”She told Ghetto Radio. “
The near-simultaneous attacks against U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, killed 213, 12 foreigners people and injured more than 5,000.
They were orchestrated by Osama bin Laden and executed by al-Qaida operatives.
However two decades later Mwikali is dismayed to learn that her details of the compensation plan are yet to be captured in the US compensation plans, finger crossed that she was noted delisted.
With multiple fractures and now retrenched, she pleades with the national government to follow up with United States and iron out the alleged disparity in compensation .
“Most naturalized citizens after the attack, could receive several hundred thousand dollars, but people who were citizens at the time of the attack stand to receive millions.” She said.
