Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service with me Alex Last.

And today we take you back to August 1998 when the US embassy in Nairobi

was hit by a massive bomb in a coordinated al-Qaeda attack on US missions in East Africa.

Listeners may find parts of this program disturbing.

I cannot describe to you the sound. It went off and I was lifted up and all the ceiling came down upon me and barred me where I was.

And then the smoke started feeling up the building.

Then I started hearing some cries, people crying for help, people shouting, some

cry, some crying, some people are reeling in pain.

That morning, Friday, August 7, 1998, George Mimber had been working at his desk on the first floor of the U.S. Embassy.

George was a Regional Information Systems Manager at the U.S. Mission. The In Kenyan employees working at the U.S. Embassy, his fellow workers gave him the nickname, Chairman.

The embassy Fridays is the day that people would look forward for.

So it was a beautiful day, people are so happy. It was sunny. You know

Narrowby when it's when it's beautiful. It's beautiful.

When you in the building you'd think that once you walked into the embassy you are safe because the windows were

bulletproof and then the building was concrete reinforced you think you're in a

nuclear station. The US embassy was in downtown Nairobi. It was protected by Kenyan security guards and U.S. Marines.

But in Kenya at that time, few saw it as being under threat, and few had heard of an extremist group called Al-Qaeda.

But at around 1030 a.m. two Al-Qaeda militants armed with guns and grenades drove a truck bomb into a side street between the embassy and two office blocks.

Posing as contractors, they wanted to drive the truck with a bomb inside,

through the rear gate, and into the embassy's underground parking, but the Kenyan

guards at the gate wouldn't let them through.

I was in the process of doing an email. The first explosion came.

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