Deaths in Embassy Blasts Rise to 147; Rescuers Probe Rubble

NAIROBI, Kenya — “Thanks a lot for helping me, but I have to leave you people,” said the man known only as Mr. Mugumbi. “Bad luck, but I have to go.”

With that farewell, he slipped into unconsciousness Saturday and died.

Paramedic Omar Juma, his eyes welling with tears, had lost another patient to the office tower-turned-graveyard on Aga Khan Walk, the grassy pedestrian way near the U.S. Embassy here that has become a watch-post of despair in this grieving capital.

“We thought he was going to make it,” said Juma, who could see and even touch the man trapped beneath the heavy rubble of Friday’s terrorist bomb blast but was unable to resuscitate him. “He had given me a piece of [debris] he requested be kept as a souvenir. I put it in the ambulance.”

Even with a successful effort late in the night by Israeli soldiers to free a man trapped for nearly 36 hours, it was mostly a long day of disappointment Saturday for the hundreds of exhausted Kenyan rescue workers listening for the cries of the dying like worried parents searching for a lost child.

Each glimmer of hope from the two-story mound of destruction--the faint whimper of a woman, the cough of a crumpled man--was later met with pain and heartache as heavy silence signaled another surrender to death.

“We are taking it brick by brick,” said Supt. Mike Harries, the chaplain general for the Kenyan police. “That’s the best we can do.”

But for Mr. Mugumbi, the pile of concrete that finally killed him was too unstable to remove. For four people trapped in an elevator shaft, round-the-clock digging was not fast enough to free them. Another man, known only as Mr. Gitau, struggled gallantly to keep awake but suddenly whispered, “Bye, bye,” and never opened his eyes again. Medical crews rushed oxygen to him, but “he was gone,” a Red Cross worker said.

“We’ve been here since first thing yesterday, sleeping for a few hours in a tent,” said Elizabeth Njoroge, a volunteer nurse staring blankly at the heap of concrete, steel and office furniture that had been the Ufundi Cooperative House. “I haven’t seen them come out of there alive for a long, long time. It makes you feel very helpless.”

In all, nine bodies were removed from the wreckage on Saturday, while at least as many were left in place because it was still too difficult to extract them. In addition, Njoroge said, 12 trapped girls from a secretarial college on the building’s sandwiched third floor managed to scribble their names on a piece of paper, but by Saturday afternoon there was no sign of life in their tiny cavern.

“The coordination has not been good,” she said of the rescue effort, which has been dedicated but often chaotic. “They aren’t getting to these people fast enough. They can’t survive long in such conditions.”

By late Saturday, rescue officials said that just two people still buried in the collapsed building were known to be alive, one of whom was pulled out of a ground-floor cubbyhole by an Israeli rescue team after 10 p.m. But officials from the Ufundi Cooperative, a credit union for public service employees that occupied most of the building, said the death toll would most assuredly rise.

“We have a staff of close to 100,” said Aloys Sangira Okello, general manager of the credit union who escaped death only because his car was having troubles and he stepped outside to jump-start it. “We typically have not less than 1,000 people in the building on a Friday because our members come to collect their checks.”

Asked to name employees of the cooperative still unaccounted for, Ufundi accountant Camlos Oliech Ogunde jotted down 40 names in a matter of minutes. Could he help find an official from the secretarial college, another tenant in the building?

“Not a single one can be found,” he said.

The credit union survivors stood clustered in a somber circle inside a police barrier, occasionally stepping forward to offer counsel or draw a crude map of a tiny corner of a ground floor bank left standing. Rescuers, trying to penetrate a wall to reach the two known survivors, had tremendous difficulty navigating the crumbled corridors, which had been propped up with toothpick-like metal braces to prevent a further collapse.

The conversation soon turned to the sad story of Mr. Gitau, who everyone feared was the same Gitau--Stanley N. Gitau--who had just quit an accounting job at the credit union. He was supposed to come back Friday to collect his final paycheck.

Their friend Gitau was on a high: He had gotten an American green card in the immigration lottery and was moving to Washington--a dream for many Kenyans looking for a way out of the country’s poverty. His family had already left their Nairobi apartment and had gone back to a remote village in northern Kenya to say goodbye to relatives. There was no way to track him down, they said.

“He had a big farewell party last weekend and invited the whole staff,” said Hilary James Nyacnga, the credit union’s treasurer. “It could be our Gitau that they found.”

The conversation fell silent among the group of weary middle-aged men, too tough to cry but too sad to bear much more. Without uttering a word, they moved their gathering to the other side of the police barricade, where the deadly explosion site was out of view.

“We need needles! We need syringes!” a rescue worker shouted as they retreated.