U.N. Security Chief Resigns Over Suicide Blast in Algiers

UNITED NATIONS, June 24 -- The United Nations' top security official, David Veness of Britain, resigned Tuesday after a U.N. panel criticized his department's handling of staff security in Algeria, where suicide bombers blew up two U.N. offices in December, killing 17 staffers and injuring 40 more.

The panel, headed by a top U.N. troubleshooter, Lakhdar Brahimi, concluded that U.N. officials ignored credible threats from extremist groups in the year preceding the attack. The panel's report found "ample evidence that several staff members up and down the hierarchy may have failed to respond adequately to the Algiers attack both before and after the tragedy," wrote Brahimi, a former Algerian foreign minister. The United Nations, he said, has "been found wanting."

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced Tuesday the appointment of a second panel -- a key Brahimi recommendation -- to determine individual responsibility for security lapses in Algeria, a move that he hoped would restore the "confidence and morale" of U.N. staff. The panel will present its findings in six weeks.

Brahimi wrote that his report was intended to examine U.N. efforts to improve security following the August 2003 suicide bomb attack in Baghdad that killed 22 U.N. officials and associates, including top official Sergio Vieira de Mello. It was also intended to explore why al-Qaeda and other extremist groups have targeted the United Nations.

The panel said U.N. policies on Iraq and the Middle East peace process -- which the report suggested the Arab world perceives as too aligned with the United States -- have exposed U.N. personnel to new dangers. "A growing part of the public no longer perceives the U.N. as impartial and neutral," the report said. "At the core of this is the perception that the United Nations has become an instrument of powerful member states."

As early as 2006, U.N. officials recognized that U.N. facilities or individuals would probably be targeted by militant groups, the report said, but they failed to act sufficiently to protect the 124 international and national staffers in Algiers.

Babacar Ndiaye, a U.N. security adviser who was killed in the bombing, was credited with routinely raising concerns about the threat. But his warnings gained little resonance at U.N. headquarters.

The report also cites Algeria's failure to heed U.N. appeals to improve security -- including a request for speed bumps and barriers outside the U.N. offices -- and to share intelligence with U.N. security officials. It also describes Algeria's efforts to dissuade the United Nations from upgrading the security threat level despite a spike in terror attacks. "Algiers is an accident waiting to happen," a senior U.N. official wrote in an e-mail after a visit to the city in November 2007.

Ban said that Veness, a former anti-terrorism chief at Scotland Yard, offered his resignation in a closed-door meeting Monday and that he accepted it. He said Veness "was willing to shoulder full responsibility for any security lapse that may have occurred in the context of the heinous terrorist attack on the United Nations in Algiers." Ban also praised Veness's three-year tenure as the U.N. undersecretary general for safety and security, saying he provided "strong leadership" and improved the the world body's security management system.