Investigators focus on "inside job" in UN Iraq blast

BAGHDAD, Aug 22 (AFP) - Investigators and witnesses Friday concurred that the perpetrators of the deadly bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad must have received inside information.

The latest evidence came when Gabriel Pichon and Alain Chergui, former French soldiers selected by the late Sergio Vieira de Mello to head his nine-man personal protection team, said the perpetrators "received inside information."

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"I am convinced that the people behind this attack were there when the explosion happened," Pichon said in the Saturday-dated edition of Paris newspaper Le Monde.

Chergui added that there had been a "feeling" before Tuesday's blast that the UN offices might be targeted, after the August 7 car bomb attack on the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad and "some other clues".

"We felt something was going on," he said.

"If there had been a camera surveillance system, we would probably have much better information about the aims of this act, which the perpetrators wanted to be a spectacular operation and which, unfortunately, they succeeded in," he said.

Corroborating the two men's fears, a senior UN health official said Friday in Geneva that security at the UN compound in Baghdad had been stepped up before Tuesday's blast, which left chief UN representative Vieira de Mello and 22 others dead and injured about 100 more.

"We were on a much higher level of security protection than usual," said David Nabarro, of the World Health Organisation (WHO), who himself was wounded in the attack.

Nabarro told journalists that there had been a heightened sense of security "for about the last week or two".

"In fact they'd stepped up security because there was bit of a worry of something big perhaps happening, but not necessarily to the UN," he added.

In Baghdad, a UN official told AFP Friday that Iraqi security guards at the United Nations' Baghdad headquarters aided the plotters of attack.

"They clearly had support from Iraqi security guards inside who gave intelligence to the planners of the attack," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"It was a well prepared attack. The target was Sergio Vieira de Mello, that much is clear," he said.

"They knew where Vieira de Mello's office was and they knew they would find him in his office and they packed the vehicle with the maximum amount of explosives. The vehicle was positioned in the spot where it would make that part of the building collapse," the official said.

He said some of the Iraqi guards at the Canal Hotel, the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad, had been hired under the toppled regime of Saddam Hussein and had links with the fallen dictator's intelligence services.

At 3:45 pm (1145 GMT) Tuesday, a flatbed truck came speeding into the UN compound, drove up to the section of the building where Vieira de Mello's office was located and exploded.

The UN official's comments confirmed a report in Friday's New York Times that investigators from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, who are assisting Iraqi police with their inquiry into the blast, were focussing on the possibility that the bombers received inside help.

"We believe that the UN's security was seriously compromised," a US official told the paper. "We have serious concerns about the placement of the vehicle."

Pichon and Chergui told Le Monde they were convinced that Vieira de Mello was the main target of the bombing. The UN officials who gave Vieira de Mello such an exposed office "committed a big error."

Both he and Chergui had been within metres (yards) of Vieira de Mello when the explosion happened.

Pichon said the force of the blast threw him against a wall, thus saving him from the collapsing ceiling that trapped the UN envoy, who had his legs crushed under a cement bloc and died slowly from blood loss.

tn/tm

Iraq-UN-blast-security

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This article is Copyright 2003 by Agence France-Presse.

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