The truck was parked in a largely unguarded car park across the street but the force of the blast tore through the 10-storey building, which itself is surrounded by a concrete
blast wall, as well as nearby apartment blocks.
Sadie, a search dog for the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, sniffed out a bomb behind a 2ft 6in concrete
blast wall at the United Nations' Kabul compound in November 2005.
MD Keith Bell said: "We were turning over around pounds 7m but our turnover and profitability was not increasing year on year, so it was decided that we move the company into three profit centres -modular products, acoustics products and fire and
blast wall products."
"When troops established that the base was under attack, the presenters and the ITV crew were taken outside to lie on the ground behind a
blast wall for 45 minutes."
The bomb, hidden inside an orange-and-white Baghdad taxi, exploded outside a three-feet-high concrete
blast wall.
According to Kirkuk's police, the suicide bomber slammed his pickup truck into a
blast wall surrounding the headquarters around 10 am.
Mike Boettcher, a correspondent for the US television network NBC, told viewers of the Today show that the
blast wall saved the lives of the reporters inside the hotel.
Dramatic television pictures showed a bomber driving a cement-mixer full of explosives towards the 12ft concrete
blast wall outside the Palestine Hotel, and detonating it.
Television pictures showed the cement truck moving backward and forward a few times, with gunfire blasting away, before it made its way through an empty space in the
blast wall along Firdous Square.