IRAQ - Aug. 19 - UN Envoy Killed In Baghdad Bomb Blast.

A yellow cement truck crashes into the Canal Hotel, which houses the UN headquarters, around 4.30pm local time, detonating a bomb that devastates an entire wing of the hotel and kills at least 17 people, including top UN representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian national. Debris from the explosion landed 400m from the hotel and smoke continued to rise from the facility more than an hour after the explosion, as medical personnel began evacuating the wounded on stretchers and helicopters. (The explosion is the biggest setback for US-led efforts to rebuild Iraq and follows a series of escalating attacks on civilian and diplomatic targets, including oil pipelines, water mains and a car bombing of the Jordanian embassy earlier this month).

Danilo Turk, the senior political adviser to UN Sec-Gen. Kofi Annan, said the blast would not deter the UN from its mission. US Pres. Bush portrayed the attack as a terrorist strike on humanitarian workers. He said: "Men and women in the targeted building were working on reconstruction, medical care for Iraqis. They were there to help with the distribution of food". US soldiers rushed to the scene and began digging for survivors buried beneath the rubble. De Mello was one of those trapped, but was severely injured. As night fell, the Brazilian envoy was pronounced dead four hours after the bombing. A UN spokesman said the UN had received no threat of an attack and that no group had yet claimed responsibility. He stressed that the US-led coalition was in charge of security at the building. The bombing recalled similar strikes carried out by Islamists against US and diplomatic targets in places like Beirut, Nairobi and Khobar Towers over the last two decades. But terrorism experts warned against assuming outside extremists were responsible. Andrew Krepinevich, a military analyst and Pentagon adviser, said: "Success breeds imitation". De Mello was instrumental in assisting US authorities, including top US administrator Paul Bremer to set up the recently formed Governing Council. On Aug. 20, FBI investigators in Baghdad confirmed that the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber, after human remains were found in the bomb-laden cement truck. Thomas Fuentes, the top FBI agent in Iraq, said the bomb consisted of up to 1,500lb of explosive, which had detonated other munitions, including Soviet-era artillery and mortar shells.

Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Governing Council, said: "We have no doubt that those who carried out this terrorist criminal act are the remnants of the regime and their friends". Chalabi told a press conference at the heavily fortified former presidential palace used by the US-led administration in Baghdad that the Governing Council had passed on intelligence to the US about a meeting on Aug. 14 of regime loyalists and Islamists planning to attack a "soft target, not the CPA [the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority], ... using a truck to be detonated". Both Chalabi and Paul Bremer named Ansar Al Islam, an Al Qaida-linked network whose base in northern Iraq was heavily bombarded by the US early in the war. Bremer has linked Ansar Al Islam to the car bomb at the Jordanian embassy on Aug. 7, in which 19 people died. However, he also said he believed more than 100 foreign "terrorists" had entered Iraq, reinforcing the view that the country has become a focus for Islamists from neighbouring Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East (see Arab-US Relations). Mustafa Alani, a terrorism specialist at the Royal United Services Institute in London, said: "Iraq has become a major field for the Mujahideen [Muslim religious fighters]". He said Islamists from other countries had found Iraq's increasingly angry and despondent population ready to assist them. He said: "The local Islamic groups in Iraq don't have the capability to carry out bomb attacks like those on the Jordanian embassy and UN headquarters. And it would be a joke to say that it would be Saddam's supporters".