Children ask where mother is

Last Friday, 32-year old Margaret Akinyi said goodbye to her husband and four children and travelled by bus into the Kenyan capital…

Last Friday, 32-year old Margaret Akinyi said goodbye to her husband and four children and travelled by bus into the Kenyan capital, Nairobi.

An office cashier, she worked on the top floor of Ufundi Co-op House beside the American embassy.

Her job helped support an extended family living in a few small rooms in the poor suburb of Dagoretti.

Margaret's body now lies in a Nairobi mortuary. Her right side is slightly stained with blood and her features are swollen but otherwise there is no sign of injury. Tied to her left ankle with string is a disk bearing the number 3795.

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No one has described Margaret Akinyi's final moments at work and they almost certainly never will. In any case, she was probably just doing routine chores. Perhaps like many others she heard a small explosion in the car park behind her building.

But nothing could have prepared her for the huge blast which reduced her five-storey block to rubble in a matter of seconds.

Her body was dug out of the ruin of Ufundi Co-op House on Sunday. It is not known whether the terrorist attack killed her instantly or whether she survived for some time beneath the hundreds of tonnes of collapsed masonry.

I know a little about Margaret because her brother George works on the compound where I live. George was on night duty on Sunday when I heard his sister was missing.

He had visited nearly all the hospitals in Nairobi over the weekend but had been unable to trace her. He came into my house and we made some telephone calls. It took little time to establish that her body was in Nairobi City Mortuary.

We found her lying on a wet floor, staring up at the ceiling. She was wearing a dress with a cardigan over it and sandals on her feet.

On the slabs around her were more than a dozen other bodies from the bomb blast, some of them carbonised, one cut in half. I drove George out to her family's home. There were a lot of people sitting in a small room watching an American sitcom on a black and white television. Among them was Maurice, her husband. At first there was silence when George announced the news, then Maurice started wailing.

His young children stared at him as he collapsed onto the floor crying: "My wife is dead, I could never find another woman like her". No one in the room said a word.

Maurice and other family members identified her body yesterday. The children keep asking where their mother is.