St. Louis native among victims of Baghdad attack

Arthur Helton, who actively defended the rights of Haitians fleeing by boat to the United States, died Tuesday in the terrorist attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. He was 54.

Helton, who was born in St. Louis and raised in Ellisville, Mo., was believed to have been meeting with U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello when the bomb exploded Tuesday, killing more than 20 people including de Mello, officials said Wednesday.

A lawyer, human rights activist, teacher and author, Helton was program director of peace and conflict studies and senior fellow for refugee studies and preventive action at the Council on Foreign Relations, a Washington-based think tank.

"Arthur was just an amazing person," a cousin, Carolyn Green, of Edwardsville, Ill., told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "He just seemed to know what was right."

Helton was in Baghdad to assess humanitarian conditions for a series of articles he was planning to write for an online news agency.