By Daniel Ooko

    NAIROBI, Aug. 7 (Xinhua) -- Rebecca Mungai, 39, remains paralyzed from the 1998 United States embassy bombing in Nairobi. She has had little to cheer about since that fateful day, Aug. 7, 1998. She says she is still waiting for justice in the form of compensation.

    "The Americans are now feeling what innocent people like us went through and why we wanted compensation. Justice to me will only come if I am compensated," Mungai tells Xinhua.

    "If they are not going to compensate us, then they are, in other words, saying we are to blame for the condition we are in. We have spent all our savings on paying medical bills. Our families are suffering."

    The tenth anniversary is being marked as the East African security has been forced on a red hunt alert since Saturday's disappearance of al-Qaeda's operative Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who evaded arrest in Kenya's coastal town of Malindi last week.

    Analysts say the attacks ten years ago marked the first time the U.S. government recognized al-Qaida as a serious threat.

    The attacks also showed that African civilians were vulnerable to international terrorism. Some victims of the bombings believe Washington needs to do more to compensate them for their losses.

    Car bombs exploded outside the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the morning of Aug. 7, 1998. The attacks killed more than 200 people and injured around 5,000, mostly African civilians.

    Arrests and tip-off of al-Qaeda's operatives in Kenya have also renewed fears of fresh terror attacks, ten years later, since the dual bombings of U.S. embassies, which killed more than 200 and injured some 5,000.

    Kenya's anti-terrorism officials confirm search for Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, who is accused of masterminding al-Qaeda attacks in Mombasa in 2002 and the two embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, had intensified, with neighbors, Tanzania and Uganda, also joining to pin-down the elusive multi-faceted suspect.

    Reports have shown that security had beefed up at all ports including Kenya's international airport.

    The bomb attack against the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998 may have been aimed at Americans, as many people here bitterly remind each other, but there is no question that Kenyans have suffered the most.

    Ten years later, they are still coming to terms with such devastation. It has been hard even for the optimistic ones, like Mungai, and simply grim for others.

    And so the nation's recovery from the bomb blast has come with its own set of victories and setbacks.

    John Njoroge, 35, has so far spent more than 350,000 shillings (about 5,200 U.S. dollars) on medical bills and the end is not in sight. "I am always on pain-killers and I require regular physiotherapy and hydrotherapy."

    In refusing to pay more compensation, the U.S. government has argued that it was not responsible for the bomb attacks. Yet, it has accepted liability for the buildings that were destroyed.

    "Kenyans must readily accept that the assistance is absolutely humanitarian and not compensation in view of the fact that the Americans were not to blame for the misfortune and they themselves suffered during the terrorist attack," said an official from the USAID, a U.S. government aid agency.

    "If they did not bomb, I would not be in this trouble," said Vitalis Okemwa, a Kenyan victim of the attack.

    His trouble is worse than most: he was on the No. 126 bus, stalled in traffic in front of the embassy, when the explosion went off. He spent four days in a coma, then four months in the hospital.

    He lost his right eye and cannot see well with his left. He can barely walk, because his right leg was broken so badly. When his wife saw that he could not provide anymore, he said, she left with their two children.

    Many Kenyans, split by ethnic, religious and class differences, say the blast gave them a greater sense of unity, just as they pulled together ten years ago hauling the wounded from the rubble or donating blood en masse.

    Some outsiders who have helped Kenya recover from the blast -- the United States has donated 42.3 million dollars -- say they have noticed subtle differences in Kenyan society, some out of bomb-related necessity.

    Douglas Sidialo, who was until 1998 a car salesman driving around Nairobi for his job, tells a dark little joke about why that line of work is closed off to him now.

    "If I drove cars," he said. "I would knock people over."

    He was blinded completely by glass and debris that exploded through his windshield that day when terrorists bombed the United States Embassy.

    Sidialo started a group of survivors -- called, with a vein of irony, Visual Seventh August -- to provide counseling and job training and to watch over how aid money is spent.

    He wears a smile and sunglasses and works hard to set an example for other victims without his resilience. "I can't reverse the blast," Sidialo, 36, said. "I have to accept what happened and move on."

    "The blast reduced most of us into beggars," adds Joseph Okello,43. "I have to rely on family friends and relatives to pay my rent and my three children's school fees."

    A former bus driver, Okello had his right shoulder and hip-joint dislocated, and his right ear drum shattered by the blast.

    "Sometimes, I am in terrible pain for over a week," he says. His initial medical bills were paid by USAID but not any more.

    Dorothy Adhiambo's husband, a shoe salesman, was killed in the blast. As she took his body to western Kenya for burial, she said, his family decided not to recognize the marriage and emptied their house of everything: furniture, dishes, even the stove.

    Of the roughly 9,200 dollars that the government paid for her husband's death, his family took 6,500 dollars. Now she is nearly broke. "I have spent everything," Adhiambo 31, she said.

    There is also still much anger in Kenya over the blast. Some ofit remains directed at the United States, criticized in the early days for seeming to care more about the 12 Americans killed than the more than 200 Kenyans.

    Now, with unemployment sky-high and per capita income dropping, many people say the United States should do more.

    "What the Americans gave to the victims was not enough," said Julius Kinuthia, 44, a grocer in downtown Nairobi. "It's like we are fighting their war."

    Kinuthia is not a victim of the blast and, interestingly, most of the victims themselves say they do not blame the United States, even though some 2,500 of them have joined in class-action lawsuits against the U.S. government.

    Francis Gitu Maina, 33, clenched his fists on a recent evening when asked if he was angry at anyone over the blast.

    "So much," he said. But he said he blamed "the ones who came to bomb," suspected to be Osama bin Laden and his suspected associates.

    Samson Ole Kantai, on that August morning, was caught by the blast as he was crossing the street outside the embassy where he had gone to see his fiancee. She was killed, and the life of the 26-year-old banker and fledgling pilot fell apart.

    "I cannot compose myself, I sometimes have blackouts. I caused a multiple-car accident last year, and when people came, they thought I was high on drugs because I didn't show any emotion," he said.