Unfortunate means having bad luck, or causing it. Nobody's fault, or nobody who can be blamed out loud.
That second quality is what makes it so useful in official language, since calling something an unfortunate incident describes a disaster while assigning responsibility to nobody at all, and readers have learned to hear exactly that. Applied to a person it is sympathetic. The adverb unfortunately is one of the commonest words in English and usually introduces a refusal.
1adjectiveunfortunateUnlucky, or resulting from bad luck.
“It was an unfortunate choice of words.”
From un- + fortunate, a doublet of infortunate.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA