Eyewitness gives account of attack on UN headquarters in Baghdad

A United Nations official who was inside the world body's headquarters in Baghdad at the time of this week's terrorist bombing described today the first moments of the attack as an "extraordinary thud" followed quickly by the terrible smell of gunpowder and the screams and moans of people injured by showers of shattered glass.

David Nabarro, Representative of the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General for Health Action in Crises, was in the Canal Hotel in the office of Humanitarian Coordinator Ramiro Lopes da Silva just one floor below the suite of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed when the massive truck bomb went off outside the premises at about 4:45 p.m. local time Tuesday.

"I was about to go, but I had not gotten up, and suddenly there was this extraordinary thud," Dr. Nabarro told a press briefing in Geneva today. "Ramiro was opposite, and he said 'Ow, I have been hit,' and he had glass stuck in his forehead. Mohamed…said, I think I have been hit too, and he had blood coming down. I am afraid it is still on my notebook.

"The two other colleagues also were cut by flying glass. I had glass stuck in the back of my neck. Then the lights went out. Ramiro's secretary next door was terribly distressed. There was a terrible smell. Like you had a load of fireworks in a big barrel and you smell the gunpowder. There was dust. And then we started to hear the screams and the moans. And that just went on and on."

Dr. Nabarro said he and the others finally made their way through broken masonry to a tiny lawn where there were already about 18 people where there were the dead and dying. "The first 20 to 30 minutes were kind of like a very slow movie really," he said. "And then the Americans came, and we started sorting out. We got the people who died, people who needed to get out quickly, people who could hang around a bit, people who were walking around wounded."

Dr. Nabarro said he then went to the epicentre of the blast "and then I realized who was under there, that almost certainly Sergio was under there, that Nadia (Younes, Mr. Vieira de Mello's chief of staff, who also died) was under there. [The rescuers] had gone up on to the roof and they had started to dig out very gently. People said that they could hear Sergio."

He said that when he had arrived at the Canal Hotel just 45 minutes before the blast, security had been very meticulous as usual, searching underneath the car. In fact security had increased because of concern that something big might happen, though not necessarily to the UN, following the earlier deadly bombing of the Jordanian embassy, he added.

Meanwhile on the ground in Baghdad today, the grim task of recovering the bodies of other victims and identifying the 22 confirmed dead continued. In addition to Ms. Younes, the latest to be identified are Reham Al-Farra of Jordan and Alya Souza of Iraq. Marilyn Manuel of the Philippines, who originally had been listed as among the dead, suffered minor injuries and was still in Baghdad.

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said a 100-metre security cordon had been set up around its offices in Baghdad. The agency's estimated 300 staff members were staying in Iraq, including half of them in the capital.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) said its food distribution operations would continue through the 44,000 distribution agents of the Iraqi Ministry of Trade.

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