Author: NEIL MacFARQUHAR with DOUGLAS
JEHL
Publication: The New York Times
Date: May 13, 2003
Four separate overnight bombing
attacks struck Western targets including residential compounds in Riyadh,
the Saudi capital, causing an undetermined number of deaths and dozens
of injured, Saudi officials and diplomats said today.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh
said 44 Americans had been injured, some of them seriously, and there were
reports of at least 10 deaths.
Local news reports citing hospital
officials and residents of the compounds that were struck quoted them as
saying that the car- bomb attacks had apparently left some victims dead.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell,
travelled to Saudi Arabia from Jordan today.
``It seems we have lost 10 Americans
killed,'' Mr. Powell told Reuters shortly after arriving at Riyadh airport
from Jordan.``Many other nationalities were also killed.''
At an early morning news conference
in Amman, Mr. Powell that the violence had likely been carried out by Al
Qaeda, since it bore its hallmarks.
Al Qaeda has been weakened but not
been destroyed, Mr. Powell said, noting that he could not yet confirm completely
that Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. He said the United States
and other nations must increase their efforts to fight terrorism.
There was no official Saudi report
of deaths from the attacks. But live pictures from the scene attested to
the power of the blasts. The walls and buildings of one apartment building,
once apparently four stories high, were completely blown out, and the blackened
exterior walls were blasted complelety from their foundation. The twisted
and burned wreckage of cars littered the streets.
The compounds are home to American,
British, Italian and other Westerners, as well as to Saudis and citizens
of other Middle Eastern countries. Some of those attacked were the upscale
enclaves that house the high-paid Western executives who run joint ventures
and other large businesses in the kingdom.
Three blasts came almost simultaneously
just before midnight local time, and a fourth followed shortly afterward,
Saudi officials said.
"The three explosions that occurred
in eastern Riyadh were suicide bombings," the Saudi interior minister,
Prince Nayef, told Al Riyadh daily, the newspaper's Web site reported.
"They were set off by cars stuffed
with explosives that were driven into the targeted compounds," he said.
The United States Embassy said that
at two of the compounds the booby-trapped vehicles came to the rear gate
and detonated there, prompting a gunfire with security guards, but in some
cases the explosives-laden vehicles breached the walls and exploded within
the compounds. At the third compound, vehicles crashed through the gates,
killing the armed guards on duty.
"The bombs seem to have been very
big and there is some kind of structural damage to houses and apartments,"
said John Burgess, the counselor for public affairs at the American Embassy
in Riyadh. "There are still quite a number of people unaccounted for."
The Saudi ruling family has warned repeatedly that the failure to promote
peace in the region would inflame extremist sentiment and that the occupation
of Iraq would only serve to fuel such attacks.
The attackers struck after the State
Department issued an extraordinarily specific warning on May 1 that terrorists
"may be in the final phases of planning attacks" on American targets in
Saudi Arabia.
"We didn't have anything particular
in mind, except there were clearly plans for something to happen or that
someone was planning to do something," Mr. Burgess said. "There was no
specificity in the warnings that the U.S. got about attacks in Saudi Arabia."
The attacks followed a botched attempt
by the Saudi security services to seize a cell that the Interior Ministry
accused of being linked to the terrorist network Al Qaeda.
A senior Saudi official said that
19 suspected militants, 17 of whom are Saudis, sought in the raid had escaped.
The suspects, the official said, had served in Afghanistan or Chechnya
and had links to radical clerics.
A huge arms cache including 800
pounds of advanced explosives along with hand grenades, assault rifles,
ammunition, disguises and tens of thousands of dollars in cash were seized,
a Saudi official said.
United States officials said the
nearly simultaneous explosions were reminiscent of the Qaeda attacks on
American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
A senior government official who
spoke on the condition that neither his identity nor his nationality be
disclosed said on Monday night, "There's been a lot of chatter in the last
six weeks involving possible attacks by Al Qaeda, and it looks like this
time they succeeded."
According to Saudi officials, the
main attack was at the Hamra compound, whose residents comprise roughly
equal numbers of Westerners and Arabs.
Diplomats said the wounded foreigners
were reportedly from the Hamra compound. The Saudi-owned Al Arabiya satellite
news channel reported that a number of charred victims were transferred
to an area hospital.
Smoke lingered over the Hamra compound
as police cars and ambulances rushed in. Hundreds of anti-riot policemen
and members of the National Guard converged on the scene, evacuating compound
residents and sealing off the area. Another attack was at a compound known
as Granada, whose residents included employees of a British aerospace company
and, possibly, a British school, the Saudi official said.
The third attack, the Saudi official
said, was at the premises of the Vinnell Corporation, an American consulting
group for the Saudi National Guard.
Officials at the Vinnell Corporation,
which is based in Fairfax, Va., did not respond to a request for comment
late Monday. Frank Moore, a spokesman for the corporation's parent company,
Northrop Grumman, declined to comment.
News agency reports from Riyadh
quoted witnesses as saying the explosions caused extensive property damage,
leveling entire houses. The witnesses said the force of the blasts shook
buildings and rattled windows.
American officials with access to
early reports suggested there was an element of precision in the attacks.
In each case, they said, the attackers appeared to have shot their way
into and out of the compound, and possibly used car bombs to set off large
explosions.
According to The Associated Press,
the fourth blast went off early this morning at the headquarters of the
Saudi Maintenance Company, also known as Siyanco. The company is a joint-
owned venture between Frank E. Basil Inc. of Washington, and local Saudi
partners, The A.P. said.
The attacks appear to be the third
major strike in the country by suspected militant Islamists since the Persian
Gulf war in 1991.
In 1995, a car bomb exploded at
an American-run military training facility in Riyadh run by Vinnell. Seven
people died, including five American advisers to the Saudi National Guard.
In 1996, a truck bombing killed 19 Americans at the Khobar Towers barracks
in Dhahran. Iran was initially blamed for that attack, but it is increasingly
believed to have been the work of Al Qaeda.
Most foreigners in Saudi Arabia
live in walled, gated communities that allow them to escape the strict
legal codes of the Wahhabi sect of Islam prevalent in the kingdom.
Liquor is readily available and
men and women can mix freely at the swimming pools on most compounds, liberties
unthinkable elsewhere in Saudi Arabia. There are some 40,000 American residents
in Saudi Arabia, according to the American Embassy, with 12,000 of them
in Riyadh.
The kingdom is dependent on Western
technical expertise for its oil industry and has long imported foreign
specialists for its hospitals and other services. But the presence of such
enclaves grates on the fundamentalists, especially the presence of American
military forces.
One of the stated goals of Osama
bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of Al Qaeda, was to drive Western military
forces out of the kingdom, the birthplace Islam and home to its two holiest
cites, Mecca and Medina.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
announced last week that most of the 5,000 American troops who have been
stationed in Saudi Arabia since the gulf war would leave by the end of
the summer, and they have already begun withdrawing.
