baghdad, Iraq – Agents from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation led the search for clues in the rubble of a bombed UN compound in Baghdad on Wednesday, while UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the deadly attack that killed his top envoy to Iraq would not drive the world body out of the country.
UN workers were told to stay at home Wednesday after a cement truck packed with explosives blew up outside the offices of the top UN envoy in Iraq. The unprecedented attack against the world body killed the envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 19 others, and wounded at least 100 people.
Annan said he was to meet with the Security Council later in the day to discuss security arrangements for UN workers in Iraq.
“We will persevere. We will continue. It is essential work,” Annan told reporters in Stockholm, Sweden, where he stopped briefly before heading to UN headquarters in New York. “We will not be intimidated.”
“We have been in Iraq for 12 years and we have never been attacked,” Annan said. He said now the UN would re-evaluate its security measures.
Unlike US occupation forces, the UN had been welcomed by many Iraqis. There was no clear indication of who was behind the attack on the three-story Canal Hotel, and no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack.
“We don’t yet know for sure whether this was a suicide bombing. The Iraqi police are busy with their investigation and I’m sure when they have some information to announce, the chief of police, Ahmed Ibrahim, will announce that,” said L Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq.
“There are at least two hypotheses,” he told NBC television in the US, saying one blamed remnants of the former regime and the other insurgents from overseas.
World leaders condemned the attack, and US President George W Bush vowed: “The civilized world will not be intimidated.”
As some nations raised fears of more attacks and others suggested Washington end its occupation of Iraq, China’s president, Hu Jintao, urged the UN to continue its mission to rebuild the nation. Germany’s Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder blamed the attack on “forces that do not want the rebuilding of Iraq to take place in peace and freedom.”
Iraq’s governing council, which blamed the attack on members of Saddam Hussein’s regime aided by militants from outside Iraq, declared three days of mourning.
Council member Ahmad Chalabi told reporters a monument to Vieira de Mello would be built.
“There is a feeling, based on accumulated data from the past, that it is the remnants of Saddam’s regime and their friends” behind the attack, Chalabi said, indicating he was including al-Qaida by using the word friends.
Hopes of finding survivors was fading Wednesday, and the rescue operation was turning into a grim search for the bodies of the many people unaccounted for at the heavily damaged UN headquarters. US soldiers maintained a large presence in the area, and US Army trucks were coming and going from the compound.
Heavy machinery was pulling up the smashed pieces of the building, strewn by the blast.
“There are so many people who are still missing,” said Veronique Taveau, a spokeswoman for the UN Humanitarian Coordinator.
A cement truck detonated at the concrete wall outside the three-story Canal Hotel at 4:30 pm Tuesday, blasting a 1.8-meter-deep crater in the ground, shredding the facade of the hotel housing UN offices and stunning an organization that had been welcomed by many Iraqis in contrast to the US-led occupation forces.
Except for the recently built concrete wall, UN officials at the headquarters refused heavy security because the UN “did not want a large American presence outside,” said Salim Lone, the UN spokesman in Baghdad.
Fifteen bodies in white bags were counted by a UN worker at the hotel, and a survey of Baghdad hospitals by The Associated Press found five others who had died in the blast. Taveau said Wednesday the UN figure for the dead was 17 and 100 people wounded.
Taveau said the UN operations in Iraq had been temporarily suspended and that travel arrangements were being made for employees who wanted to leave Iraq.
Local employees were told to stay home. Foreign workers were directed to stay in the lodgings that are scattered in many small hotels around the capital.
“Moving outside is forbidden,” said Salam Quzaz, from the UN Development Program.
Vieira de Mello, who had left his job as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to go to Iraq on temporary assignment, was meeting with other UN officials when the explosion struck. A news conference was also under way in the building, where 300 UN employees had worked.
The 55-year-old veteran diplomat from Brazil, serving in what one UN spokesman called the world body’s toughest assignment, was trapped in the rubble, and workers gave him water as they tried to extricate him. Hours later, the UN announced his death.
Wednesday in Geneva, UN staff sealed Vieira de Mello’s private office in the lakeside headquarters of the human rights office and attached a photograph of him to the door. Staff placed flowers and a candle in front of the door next to a pale blue UN flag.
UN and US officials called the bombing a “terrorist attack.”
Tuesday’s attack resembled others blamed on Islamic militants elsewhere in the world. It was far more sophisticated than the guerrilla attacks that have plagued US forces, featuring hit-and-run shootings carried out by small bands or remote-control roadside bombs.
In a separate attack, insurgents fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US convoy Wednesday, killing a civilian working for the occupation force and injuring two soldiers, US Major Brian Luke said.
As FBI agents joined the investigation, Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner who is rebuilding the Iraqi police force, told reporters that evidence suggested the attack was a suicide bombing.
But he said it was “much too early” to say if Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network was behind the attack. “We don’t have that kind of evidence yet.”
U.S. forces have been focusing on trying to put down Saddam Hussein loyalists thought to be behind the guerrilla campaign against American troops. But the military has also warned of foreign Islamic militants slipping into the country and has said an al-Qaida linked group, Ansar al-Islam, was a possible suspect in the Jordanian Embassy bombing.
The civilian contract worker is the second to be killed this month in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown. Luke said it was not immediately known whom he worked for.
The United Nations distributes humanitarian aid and is developing programs aimed at boosting Iraq’s emerging free press, justice system and monitoring of human rights.
