Terror Watch: No Clue

Investigators appear to be making little progress in identifying who put together and carried out the suicide-bombing attack last week on United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, frustrating both U.S. and U.N. officials.

Despite a claim of "responsibility" published by at least one Islamic Web site (myislah.org), U.S. and U.N. investigators say they have no way of authenticating the message. Officials also have little more than theories about who might have carried out the bombing plot, which some investigators call "professional," well organized and well financed. In fact, the list of theoretical suspects might even be growing.

The latest speculation: that commercially minded bandits with no political or ideological commitment may have teamed up with religious militants or former Baathists to conduct the attack. This theory has been added to the already confusing list of possible explanations because investigators say they fear well-organized criminal gangs are becoming an increasing security threat in Iraq. Such gangs may have access to potent caches of arms that disappeared when large sections of Saddam's security forces melted into their surroundings as American troops bore down on Baghdad last spring.

One Bush administration official who visited postwar Iraq said that the kinds of stolen weapons now available on Iraq's black market include everything from pistols and rifles to bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Investigators have said the bomb that exploded outside the U.N.'s Baghdad headquarters apparently was composed not of homemade or plastic explosives but from munitions apparently looted from Saddam's arsenals.

Investigators are fairly certain there was a political or religious motive behind the U.N. bombing and that the possible involvement of bandits or organized crime in the attack would principally have been to supply munitions. But they remain puzzled about the motive for the attack, which killed the senior U.N. representative in Baghdad, Sergio de Mello, and 22 other U.N. staffers and bystanders.

Initial suspicion centered on either Saddam diehards or Jihadi fighters who allegedly have been infiltrating Iraq from nearby Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran as part of their religious crusade against infidels. Both groups might view U.N. personnel as collaborators with U.S. forces. And the Baathist connection was heightened by the revelation that the U.N. compound employed the same security guards that guarded its offices before the war, and that many of these were suspected to have been informants for Saddam's intelligence services.