This is a TL on what would happen if the U.N.'s “go to guy”, the one man that the Secretary Generals depended on for in crisis situations, the only U.N. man who was trusted by all five nations in the Security Council, the man that U.N staffers placed bets on not if, but when he would be chosen Secretary General, Sergio Vierra de Mello, known to the U.N. Staffers as just “Sergio”, was was not killed in a truck bomb in the Canal Hotel Bombing,
August 29, 2003
16:25-
Security officers at the U.N. headquarters in the Baghdad Canal Hotel detect a suspicious person i a vehicle near the hotel. The driver, Fahdal Nassim, an Algerian national, was taken out of the vehicle and placed into custody. Meanwhile, officers detect explosives in the vehicle, prompting an evacuation of the hotel.
16:26
Interrupted in the middle of the meeting, U.S. soldiers who were happening to be in the area told Sergio Vierra De Mello, Special Representative of the Secretary General to the United Nations Mission in Iraq, that there was a truck bomb in the area and that the whole building was being evacuated. He, rather famously, said to the U.S. soldier, 1st Sgt William Von Zhele, “Oh shit.” [1]
16:28
The entire staff of the building was evacuated to a safe location 2,000 meters away.
16:45
The truck bomb was defused via U.S. Army EOD technicians which, although was not needed as the suicide bomber who had the controls was arrested, it was primarily done as a safety precaution.
Sergio commented, “... this underscores the reason that we need more security in the Baghdad headquarters. We got a lucky break, but in this field, in this location, in this business, lucky breaks do not cut it. You cannot just run aid operations hoping that you just get lucky. The events of today should not at all make our work on the reconstruction of Iraq end. We need to get back to work, but I do think that this serves as a caution that there needs to be greater security in the area, We cannot survive only on luck again.”
[1]
According to Samantha Power's Chasing the Flame, these were Sergio's last words.