Kenya remembers bombing

By Daniel Wallis

NAIROBI (Reuters) - The world must solve crises in the Middle East and Somalia or they will spawn more of the extremism that led to bombings of U.S. embassies in east Africa a decade ago, Kenya's prime minister warned on Thursday.

Raila Odinga was speaking at a ceremony commemorating the 10th anniversary of explosions that tore through Washington's missions in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and killed more than 200 people, mostly local Africans.

The attacks were blamed on al Qaeda -- the first time Osama bin Laden's group had burst onto the world stage.

"The scale of this atrocity shocked our nation to the core," Odinga said after laying a wreath at the site of Nairobi blast.

"We must leave no stone unturned in fighting the scourge of terrorism. But at the same time, unless we provide just solutions to political crises such as those in the Middle East, new extremists will continue to be created," he added.

At a commemoration ceremony at the U.S. State Department in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid tribute to "innocent people stolen from us in a moment of terror."

Rice said the embassy bombings were seen in a new light following al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the bombing of the USS Cole warship off the coast of Yemen in 2000 and other incidents.

"We see them (the embassy bombings) as they were, as the opening of a new twilight struggle between hope and fear, peace and hatred, freedom and tyranny -- a struggle that has now finally fully been joined," said Rice.  Continued...