The bombings took place eight years to the day after US troops were ordered to Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden considered the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, home to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, a grave offense.
More than 20 people have been indicted in the United States for the bombings.
On 7 August, between 10:30 a.m. and 10:40 a.m. local time, suicide bombers in trucks laden with explosives parked outside the embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and almost simultaneously detonated.[12] 213 people were killed in the Nairobi blast, while 11 were killed in Dar es Salaam.[13] An estimated 4,000 in Nairobi were wounded, and another 85 in Dar es Salaam.[citation needed] Seismological readings analyzed after the bombs indicated energy of between 3–17 tons of high explosive material.[14] Although the attacks were directed at American facilities, the vast majority of casualties were local citizens of the two African countries; 12 Americans were killed,[15] including two Central Intelligence Agency employees in the Nairobi embassy,[16] and one U.S. Marine, Sergeant Jesse Aliganga, a Marine Security Guard at the Nairobi embassy.[17][18]
The explosion damaged the embassy building and collapsed the neighboring Ufundi Building where most victims were killed, mainly students and staff of a secretarial college housed there. The heat from the blast was channeled between the buildings towards Haile Selassie Avenue where a packed commuter bus was burned. Windows were shattered in a radius of nearly 1 kilometer.
Following the attacks, a group calling itself the "Liberation Army for Holy Sites" took credit for the bombings. American investigators believe the term was a cover used by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who had actually perpetrated the bombing.[19] The attacks brought Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri—and their terrorist organization al-Qaeda—to the attention of the American public for the first time, and resulted in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) placing bin Laden on its ten most-wanted fugitives list.