Hitting the US, through UN

A massive truck bomb devastated the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing the UN special envoy to Iraq and at least 14 ...

A massive truck bomb devastated the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, killing the UN special envoy to Iraq and at least 14 others in what may have been a suicide attack, officials said.

Scores were wounded and rescue workers battled into the night to save those trapped in the rubble. Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s new special representative to US-administered, post-war Iraq, survived for several hours in the wreckage of his office. It took the full force of the blast and may have been targeted.

But the 55-year-old Brazilian diplomat, who made a career defending human rights, died of his wounds, a UN spokesman said.

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The attackers may have been aiming as much to discredit the US occupying forces as to strike at the United Nations, whose main role in Iraq is providing humanitarian aid, analysts said.

Speaking before he confirmed the envoy’s death, Chief UN Spokesman Fred Eckhard stressed the US occupying force was responsible for providing security in Iraq. Some of the UN’s 300 or so staffers were still trapped, officials at the scene said.

‘‘Such terrorist incidents cannot break the will of the international community to further intensify its efforts to help the people of Iraq,’’ the Security Council said in a statement. The bloody attack on the body’s civilian staff would fail in its goal of undermining the UN role in Iraq, the Council said after a meeting. Annan said he was ‘‘shocked and dismayed’’.

There was no claim of responsibility. ‘‘The explosion was caused by a massive truck bomb,’’ Bernard Kerik, the senior US police official in Baghdad, said. ‘‘We have evidence to suggest it could have been a suicide attack.’’

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Television pictures from inside the three-storey building showed a man addressing reporters when it went dark at the sound of a huge explosion, around 4.30 pm (1230 GMT). Just hours earlier, US and Kurdish officials in Iraq announced the detention overnight of Saddam’s Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan in Mosul.

Security analysts said groups angry at the US-dominated world order and determined to discredit Bush’s promises to bring stability and prosperity to Iraq may have been behind it. ‘‘I think it’s about wrecking the prospects of effective rebuilding in Iraq,’’ said Rosemary Hollis of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

She said Saddam loyalists or Muslim militants like Al Qaeda could be involved. US officials say Osama bin Laden’s network, which has used suicide trucks bombs before, is present in Iraq.

‘‘The impression now is that US is losing control,’’ said Mustafa Alani at London’s Royal United Services Institute. Reuters