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Wall couldn't stop bomb
19/08/2003 22:03 - (SA)
Baghdad, Iraq - The United Nations had just completed building a 3.66m concrete wall around its Baghdad headquarters, but it proved no protection against a cement truck loaded with nearly 226.8kg of C4-explosives.
The truck was parked just outside the wall at the corner of the building were Sergio Vieira de Mello, a 55-year-old veteran Brazilian diplomat, was at work 16:30 on Tuesday, 30 minutes before the UN offices were to close. The top UN official died in the attack, trapped in the rubble produced by what appeared to have been a very carefully planned assault.
L Paul Bremer, the top US civilian official in Iraq, speculated that de Mello may have been the target of the attack. At least 19 other people were killed and 100 were wounded.
"The truck was parked in such a place here in front of the building that it had to affect his office which was on the second floor above us from here. These people are not content with having killed thousands of people. They just want to keep killing and killing. But they won't have their way," a shaken Bremer said at the scene of the explosion.
A senior US official in Baghdad told the Associated Press that the cement truck carried twice the amount of explosives used in a car bombing at the Jordanian Embassy August 7 that killed 19 people.
The US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said authorities surmised the attack was a suicide bombing because parts of the body of the person believed driving the truck were found 200m from the crater.
Crater
The new wall around the UN compound was about 16m away from de Mello's office at the point where the cement truck exploded, creating a crater 5m wide and 6m deep.
The United Nations took over the Canal Hotel after the 1991 Gulf War and ran its weapons inspection and destruction programme from the building along with its humanitarian assistance efforts.
The hotel sits on the Army Canal, a shipping bypass that links the Tigris River north and south of Baghdad. The channel of the famous Fertile Crescent river snakes through ancient Baghdad in a series of sharp twists and turns.
The blue and white hotel - parts faced with dun-coloured brick - was built in the mid-1970s and was Baghdad's only tourist class hotel until Western chains were allowed to build in the tightly controlled country in the 1980s.
The walled compound that contained the hotel and ancillary buildings was about 200m by 300m. The building itself is about 100m square. It was lightly guarded and normally no vehicles were allowed to park at the perimeter fence. It was not clear if guards had attempted to move the cement truck or if it just pulled into place and was blown up by the driver.
While asserting the attack was terrorist in nature, UN and US officials were careful on Tuesday not to claim it was done by foreigners. The United States has, however, routinely asserted foreign terrorist elements have come to Iraq. So far there has been no claim that the foreign fighters have taken part in attacks on Americans. Sixty-one soldiers have died in attacks in Iraq since US President George W Bush declared major fighting over May 1.
- AP
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