Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsat

BAGHDAD, 23 September 2003 — A suicide car bomber blew himself up near United Nations headquarters in Baghdad yesterday, also killing a security guard and wounding 19 people, a month after a huge truck bomb devastated the building.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed dismay at the attack, launched on the eve of a UN General Assembly meeting in New York which an Iraqi delegation is due to attend.

“We need a secure environment to be able to operate,” Annan said on arrival at UN headquarters. “We will go forward, but of course if it continues to deteriorate, then our operations will be handicapped considerably.”

One of Iraq’s representatives, Governing Council member Akila Al-Hashimi, was critically wounded on Saturday in an assassination attempt in Baghdad.

Capt. Sean Kirley, a US officer at the scene of yesterday’s blast, some 250 meters from the UN building where 22 people died last month, described it as a suicide attack.

Kirley said the bomber drove into the UN car park and was stopped by an Iraqi security guard.

The force of the blast blew the car in half and scattered shreds of metal dozens of meters. A blackened and burned-out hulk was all that remained of the vehicle.

“The driver and the guard engaged in conversation and the bomb was detonated from inside the vehicle,” Kirley said.

Kirley said the bomber had been aiming for the UN building but was deterred by the security. “He wanted to get into the UN headquarters and he changed his target,” he said.

US military spokesman Lt. Col. George Krivo told a news conference the attack was “an act of sheer brutality”.

In other violence yesterday, men in two cars attacked a police station in the southern city of Basra with gunfire and explosives, wounding nine policemen, a senior police officer said. In the northern city of Mosul, assailants fired rocket-propelled grenades at a police station, wounding a number of policemen and bystanders, local officials and witnesses said.

Annan, opening an international conference on terrorism, said those fighting militancy must also hold out the promise of a better and fairer world.

“If we do not, we shall find ourselves acting as a recruiting sergeant for the very terrorists we seek to suppress,” he told world leaders.

In Baghdad, Hanan Tahir, a nutritionist with the World Food Program, said the attack near the UN building caused panic among staff. “They were screaming, shouting,” she said. “They were crying and they were running.”

Aqeel Abd Ali, a guard at the building, said the torso and head of the bomber had been found, and the face was still recognizable. Police were trying to identify him.

UN spokeswoman Antonia Paradela said 19 people were wounded, two of them Iraqi UN staff.

“This incident today once again underlines that Iraq remains a war zone and a high risk environment, particularly for those working to improve the lives of the Iraqi people,” Kevin Kennedy, the senior UN official in Baghdad, said in a statement read out by Paradela at the scene.

Paradela said UN staff did not know why they were being targeted. “It’s not really for lack of security that this happens,” she said. “If people are willing to kill themselves there’s not a lot we can do.” Guerrillas killed three US soldiers over the weekend — two in a mortar attack on Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad and one in a roadside bombing near the town of Ramadi.

Rising violence has put US President George W. Bush under pressure at home. Washington is urging other countries to send troops to Iraq to help establish peace after the war that toppled Saddam Hussein in April. Since Bush declared major combat over in May, 79 US soldiers have been killed in hostile incidents in Iraq. Syria hinted it could send troops to help restore security, but only if Washington set a timetable for pulling out its forces and handing over reconstruction to the UN.

— Additional input from agencies