'Why do they hate us?'

She slipped out of bed and ran into the bedroom where her husband Bassem and their 7-year-old daughter Kinda had fallen asleep earlier in the evening. "Bassem, the Americans are here," she said urgently. "It looks like they're going to hit us."

She checked on her other daughter, Raafat. She had been suffering from her annual bout of hay fever, and the 18-year-old art student was in the television room next to the humidifier so she could breathe easier.

Raafat was still sleeping, completely oblivious of all the commotion going on around her, due to the medication she had taken earlier. There was little Saniya felt she could do. She climbed back into bed and pulled the sheets tight around her.

Bassem lay awake on the bed, listening to the appalling noise in the night sky above.

A Palestinian-born Lebanese national, Bassem had worked in Libya as an engineer for Occidental, the American oil giant, for 20 years, helping exploit the country's massive oil reserves. He and his family lived in the upmarket Ben Ashour neighborhood of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, on the ground floor of a two-story apartment block.

Bassem never heard the explosion. Instead, he watched in astonishment as the window frame suddenly flew into the room, and the roof collapsed on top of him and his daughter.

Kinda was screaming in the darkness near him. Bassem tried to move, but was pinned by the rubble. He groped in the blackness for Kinda. "Don't worry," he said, squeezing his daughter's hand. "Daddy's here, don't cry, it will be okay."

The blast had knocked Saniya unconscious. She woke to hear Bassem calling from the next room and Kinda screaming. She stumbled in the darkness, barefoot across the rubble and glass shards, choking on the fumes from the missile blast, as she called her daughter's name "Raafat! Raafat!" for several minutes. But there was no response, and Saniya knew with a terrible certainty that her daughter was dead.

"Bassem," she cried. "Raafat has gone."

Pinned beneath the rubble, Bassem heard his wife's words, and he felt a deep sense of anger and resentment well up inside him. His life and that of his family had been shattered, and nothing would ever be the same again.

It took them eight hours to dig Raafat out from under the ruins of the house. "Our pain and agony, which I cannot describe, started at that moment," Saniya says.

Raafat was one of an estimated 55 victims of an air raid mounted by US warplanes against a series of targets in Tripoli and another Libyan city, Benghazi.

The attacks were in retaliation for the bombing of a disco in Berlin, Germany, 10 days earlier in which 200 people were injured, 63 of them US soldiers; one soldier and one civilian were killed. The Reagan administration blamed Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi.

Bassem and Saniya Ghussein are not natural anti-Americans. Bassem studied in the US before going to work for Esso and then Occidental. He sent Raafat to an American Catholic school, and on family trips to the US, Saniya would take Raafat to Disney World in Florida. "We did all the typical American things," she says.

But since that terrible night 16 years ago, neither Bassem nor Saniya have stepped foot in America. They returned to Beirut in 1994 when Bassem retired.

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