1998 U.S. embassy bombingsOn August 7, 1998, the United States embassies in the East African cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya were severely damaged in nearly simultaneous truck bomb attacks. The bombings killed 213 people in Nairobi and a dozen in Dar es Salaam. An estimated 4000 were injured in the Kenyan capital and 85 in Dar es Salaam.The attacks were linked to local members of the al Qaeda terrorist group, headed by Osama bin Laden. It was this terrorist incident that first brought Bin Laden and Al Qaeda to international notoriety, and led to the FBI's placing him on the agency's Ten Most Wanted List. While the attacks were aimed at Americans, the vast majority of the victims were Africans: twelve Americans (in Nairobi) and 32 Kenyan and eight Tanzanian Embassy employees were killed. The remainder of the dead were visitors, passers-by, or people in neighbouring buildings: the Nairobi embassy lay in a busy downtown location, although that in Dar es Salaam was remoter from the city centre. In response to these bombings, on August 20 1998, U.S. President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. The Sudan missile strikes targeted the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, which was accused of producing materials for chemical weapons. Despite the Sudanese government's earlier hospitality to bin Laden, the al-Shifa factory is widely thought to have been unconnected with weapons-related activity: it was, however, Sudan's principal source of anti-malaria drugs, and its destruction is alleged to have caused thousands of otherwise preventible deaths during the malaria epidemic which hit the country in 1999. Damage to al-Qaeda's infrastructure in Afghanistan is thought to have been minor. The strikes were derided by many as an attempt by the President to deflect attention from an ongoing domestic scandal. Investigations into the embassy bombings were conducted by the FBI and Kenyan and Tanzanian authorities. A list of suspects was drawn up and several men were charged with complicity in the bombings. In an event that angered many involved in the investigation, a court in Taliban-controled Afghanistan declared on November 20, 1998 that Osama bin Laden was a "a man without a sin" in regards to the bombing.
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