Threat of more Nairobi bombs

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33783, 4 March 1975, Page 17

Threat of more Nairobi bombs

(New Zealand Press Association—Copyright) NAIROBI, March 3. A group calling itself the Makini (Poor People’s) Liberation Organisation has claimed responsibility for the bomb blast in Nairobi’s bus terminal on Saturday night, in which 27 persons were killed and about 100 injured, 35 of them seriously, Agence FrancePresse reports.

An anonymous caller telephoned the State-owned Voice of Kenya radio, threat; ening more bomb attacks unless it broadcast a communique from the organisation saying that “the country’s exploited people have endured their poverty long enough.” “If you don’t do it, we will blow up radio installations, Parliament, and the Jomo Kenyatta Conference Centre,” the anonymous caller said. The conference centre is a skyscraper housing the Kenya African National Union Party and offices of the United Nations Environment Programme. The police have today been searching all vehicles approaching, and people entering, the Voice of Kenya building. A “Daily Nation” photographer who covered the blast said that he later saw doctors doing emergency surgery in wards and bloodspattered corridors because the operating theatres were full at the Kenyatta National Hospital, to which the injured were taken. / The authorities can’ only guess at the reasons for the attack; they note that the bus-terminal victims were mainly poor people themselves, going home to their villages. Vice-President Daniel Arap Moi has condemned the latest bomb explosion as “a sense-; less act.”

An editorial in the “Daily Nation” has appealed to Kenyans not to spread harmful rumours, “because this country is among the few in the world where law, justice, and order prevail.” It added: “Let it be known that the nation is overwhelmingly behind the Government.” The blast was the latest in

a series of mysterious bomb attacks in Nairobi which began on February 14 with an explosion in the popular Starlight nightclub. A few days later a tourist information centre opposite the Hilton hotel was attacked.

Nobody was hurt by those blasts, but on the day of the tourist office bombing, an unidentified man telephoned the “Daily Nation” to say that the bombs had been planted by the Makini Liberation Front.