Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

158 • EAST AFRICAN U.S. EMBASSY ATTACKSOn 28 August 1998 the United States issued indictments againstMohamed Rashed al Owhali and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh oncharges of conspiracy to commit terrorism, use of weapons ofmass destruction, and 12 counts of murder, one for each of theU.S. citizens killed in the blast. Al Owhali had originally beendesignated to be a suicide volunteer in the Kenyan bombing butinstead fled from the truck just before it was due to explode whilethe other man, called Ahmad the German, died in the blast. AlOwhali was arrested later while trying to obtain medical help forhis injuries sustained from the blast and handed over to the UnitedStates by Kenyan officials. The second suspect, Odeh, was arrestedand questioned by Pakistani officials after arriving in Karachi,Pakistan, on a flight from Nairobi the day of the bombing. Afterthree days he was returned to Kenya and detained there and handedover to U.S. officials two weeks later.On 4 November 1998 a federal grand jury in Manhattan returneda 238-count indictment charging Osama bin Laden for the bombingsof the two embassies and conspiracy to commit other acts ofterrorism against U.S. citizens abroad. The United States offeredawards of $5 million each for information leading to the arrest orcapture of bin Laden or of his chief aide, Muhammad Atef. On 16December 1998 five more suspects were named in indictments, andanother suspect, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, was extradited fromGermany to the United States on 21 December 1998. Two othersuspects were arrested in the United States, Wadih el-Hage on 19September 1998 in Texas, and Ali A. Mohamed, a former U.S.Army sergeant assigned to Special Forces in the period 1986–1989,in California on 11 September 1998. Several other suspects wereidentified and arrested overseas while a few, including bin Ladenand Atef, remained at large. Atef was later killed in Afghanistan ina U.S. air strike in 2001.While this bombing drew forth the most extensive investigation bythe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its history to that time,in which the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as well as Kenyan,Tanzanian, and Pakistani authorities participated, it also drew attentionto the failure of selective efforts of hardening of U.S. diplomaticfacilities overseas, in which security upgrading of the embassies inKenya and Tanzania had been neglected in favor of target hardeningof facilities elsewhere deemed to be at higher risk.