It was a Friday morning, and the 53-year-old was inside a Standard Chartered bank branch on the ground floor of United Nations headquarters in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. He had gone there to take care of some routine personal banking before returning to his work at UNICEF offices on the third floor. Besides the bank staff, there were only two customers inside, Njoku and another person, but other areas of the sprawling, four-storey UN building, spread out over three wings in the shape of a Y in the city’s diplomatic district, were already buzzing with the day’s activity. When the crash rang out around 10.20 a.m., Njoku said out loud in the bank, ‘What’s that sound?’ Up above on the first floor, at least two meetings were in progress. Soji Adeniyi, a UNICEF specialist in emergency planning walking with crutches at the time because of a broken leg, was leading one of them, attended by around 10 colleagues from various UN departments. It had started at around 9 a.m., more than an hour earlier, and was supposed to wrap up by 10 a.m., but it ran over, so they were all still there, in one section of an open-space work area cordoned off with movable partitions, a large table set out in the middle.
