Blast Also Jars Tranquil Village

WITU, Kenya —  Every day, two gigantic buses lurch and bounce over hundreds of miles on a bone-jarring dirt road before making a brief, dusty stop in Witu. To the people of this predominantly African Muslim village, these rugged buses are vital links to the outside world, so they happily throw out the welcome mat.

But last week, the outside world tromped on that welcome mat, as FBI agents and Kenyan police armed with automatic weapons roared into the village looking for clues to solve the Aug. 7 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Nairobi.

This centuries-old community of 450 quiet, peace-loving people was the last place of residence for Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, the Jordanian Muslim who was charged on Friday in New York with murder in the terrorist attack that killed more than 250 people.

With wide-eyed children and shocked villagers looking on here, uniformed police surrounded the thatched-roof home where Odeh lived with his wife and infant son. They blocked the paths leading to it and stood guard at the doors while FBI agents searched inside.

One villager said he saw them scraping dirt into little bags and carrying some items away.

The intrusion demonstrated that even the remotest locations in Kenya cannot escape the impact of the double bombings at American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The blasts thrust this obscure outpost into an international story, ensnared two of its villagers and exposed its people to an event they will not soon forget.

The results have had a frightening effect on the people and will probably influence the way they view foreigners for some time to come, say those who know the village.

During the months Odeh lived and worked among them as a carpenter and clothing salesman, they had no inkling that his trade may have been nothing more than a cover for such a sinister plan as the mass killings of fellow Kenyans.

For Odeh, the road to Witu started four years ago in the Likoni suburb of Mombasa on Kenya’s southern coast, along the Indian Ocean. He had just arrived in Kenya, apparently from Jordan.

It was the perfect city for this extremely devout Muslim, especially if he was bent on helping carry out bombing attacks under the orders of suspected terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, as one of Odeh’s accused accomplices has told authorities. Odeh would not stand out in Mombasa, a city of about 550,000 that has a heavy concentration of Muslims.

One of his first missions was to find a Kenyan wife, which would automatically give him citizenship status.

For that, he went to Likoni to find Said Sagar, a retired postal employee who teaches at an Islamic school for young girls and routinely serves as a matchmaker for men.

Odeh immediately aroused his suspicion, Sagar said, speaking through a translator.

“They claimed they were working for an Islamic foundation that was assisting the needy,” Sagar recalled. “We had never heard of it.

“They said it was registered in Germany,” he added, laughing to indicate his disbelief.

“[Odeh] was a hard-faced man. He never laughed. He was in the fish business and opened a shop right up there,” he said, pointing to the main street, where hundreds of open-air stands sell goods. Odeh and his suspected accomplices reportedly used the fishing business as a cover for their conspiracy to bomb the Nairobi embassy.

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Unaware of any such conspiracy, Sagar agreed to help Odeh find a wife. He had just the right girl in mind--Nassim Amina Mohammed, one of his most devout students and the 17-year-old niece of Hassan Omar Hassan, who lived in Malindi, two hours up the coast.

Her father had died, so Hassan was the closest male authority figure to Amina, and Odeh had to win his consent.

The couple married in October 1994 and made a home in Mombasa, where Odeh sold fish bought in Malindi, Hassan said. They had their first child, a boy, about a year ago, and she currently is pregnant again.

In February, they moved to Witu, about a six-hour bus ride north of Malindi, and lived in a house owned by Hassan.

The villagers are a friendly, pastoral people who raise sheep, cattle, goats and camels, according to Lagat Kiprop, an assistant research scientist in ethnology for the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi.

Their homes--mud-and-stone structures covered with overlapping layers of palm fronds tied to mangrove poles--are packed closely together, separated only by narrow dirt roads and paths.

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The people here are close-knit and would apparently have welcomed Odeh and Amina into their social life.

Amina had lived here before with her mother and had taught at an Islamic school for a while.

Lorna L. Abungu, a museum archeologist in Nairobi who has spent much time in Witu, said the villagers are quick to accept foreigners, especially Muslims.

“They are a very trusting people,” she said. “They don’t have a lot of contact with people from the outside world. But they would not be inquisitive of a new arrival or feel the need to interrogate them.

Nevertheless, Odeh avoided any conversations beyond perfunctory greetings or what was necessary to carry on his trades, villagers say.

“He sits at his [clothing] display right over there reading religious books,” said Kantana Wilson, 32, a forest service worker.

In addition to his clothing business, Odeh started doing carpentry work for villagers, some of it very intricate and much admired, Wilson said.

He frequently made trips to Lamu Island and Mombasa, said a woman who lives next door. But the woman, who would not identify herself, did not know the purpose of those trips.

After one such trip, he brought back two laborers to help him with his carpentry. But they stayed only two or three weeks and left several weeks before the bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

They were just like Odeh--silent, devout and hard-working--villagers said.

Odeh and Amina left Witu just a few days before the bombings, stopping to spend a night with Amina’s Uncle Hassan in Malindi before heading north toward Nairobi.

Not until a week after the bombings, when Odeh’s name first surfaced in news reports, did villagers learn the frightening news about his arrest.

Amina also was taken into custody for questioning and was held for two weeks. She was released Thursday but has been unreachable.