Author: David Pallister, Paul Kelso,
and Brian Whitaker
Publication: The Guardian
Date: January 31, 2002
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,642098,00.html
Evidence that shows attacks on expats
could be work of al-Qaida supporters has been suppressed
Throughout 2000 and 2001 a large
network of supporters of Osama bin Laden, thousands of them young Saudi
men, were working on schemes to kill westerners. This culminated in the
attacks on the US of September 11.
But the frontline of their jihad
was always Saudi Arabia, where a year-long wave of bombings killed, blinded
or maimed several expatriates.
A Guardian investigation has revealed
that a large amount of evidence, pointing to supporters of the Saudi exile's
al-Qaida network as being behind the attacks, has been suppressed. All
the bombs could easily have been planted by Islamists. The Rodways, the
first victims, left their car parked in the open for 24 hours before a
bomb was planted. Noel Rooney, an Irishman who found a bomb hidden under
his car, had also left it out overnight.
Jackie Gill, one of the nurses in
a jeep that was blown up on the way home from the Celtic Corner drinking
club, reported the unusual sight, as her party first parked their car,
of two Arabs at the gate of the westerners-only compound, trying to gain
access.
Similarly, the wife of David Brown,
a Scot blinded at the port town of Khobar, reported that two Saudis had
eyed them suspiciously at the store where a bomb was subsequently planted
on their windscreen. Two Asians, possibly Pakistanis, were reported to
have handed in the parcel bomb that maimed US chiropractor Gary Hatch.
Other bombs were planted in the
street, outside a shopping mall and a bookshop. And the eighth bomb, which
killed a US oil engineer on a busy pavement, was admitted to have been
the work of a suicide bomber.
Anti-western sentiment, particularly
directed at the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, has been fuelled
for a decade by militant dissident clerics. Their calls have found a sympathetic
response, not least among the 10,000 or so Saudis who volunteered to wage
jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan.
Last week the Saudi regime conceded
the existence of an intelligence survey it had conducted last October of
educated Saudis aged between 25 and 41. The New York Times, which disclosed
it, said it concluded that 95% supported Bin Laden.
Bin Laden's notorious 1996 declaration
of war against the Americans and their allies in Saudi Arabia, was specifically
targeted at young Saudi men. It waxed eloquent about "hundreds of thousands
of unemployed graduates" in the kingdom.
He attacked Prince Naif, the Saudi
interior minister, by name for filling his jails with the country's "best
sons" and provoking the spectre of civil war.
And he praised two bombings which
al-Qaida supporters had already carried out inside Saudi Arabia. In November
1995 a car bomb in Riyadh had killed seven people, five of them US advisers.
Four young Saudi men had been forced by Prince Naif's men to confess and
were summarily executed.
The response was a huge bombing
in June 1996 near Khobar on the coast, which killed 19 US soldiers, and
forced them to relocate their base to a safer place out in the desert.
Bin Laden urged his men on: "The
explosions at Riyadh and Khobar are a warning of the volcanic eruption
emerging as a result of oppression, suffering, iniquity and humiliation
and poverty the deterioration of the economy, inflation, increasing debts
and jails full of prisoners. Government employees complain the value of
the rial is continuously deteriorating."
He issued another statement in February
1998: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies - civilians and
military - is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any
country in which it is possible to do it." This was followed by the US
embassy attacks in east Africa, which killed 225 people.
The tempo of Bin Laden-inspired
attacks in the Gulf did not slacken. On August 10 2000 a Saudi student
fired shots at expatriates at housing on the Khamis Mushayt airbase.
On October 12 in the Yemen, came
the horrific suicide bombing of the US warship, the Cole, killing 17 servicemen.
At the same time, a bomb was lobbed over the wall of the British embassy
in Yemen.
In November, about the time the
US put a price of $5m (£3.5m) on Bin Laden's head, and Kuwait seized
a large cache of explosives and grenades from his supporters, came the
first of the series of Saudi bombings against westerners.
From London, dissidents claimed
that 38 of their number had been rounded up by Prince Naif's men. As the
bombings continued, and the Saudi regime began rounding up westerners,
claiming the attacks were part of "turf war" between bootleggers, the Saudi
dissidents in London claimed the Interior Ministry had received a letter
warning that more bombs would ensue un less the "mojahedin youths" who
had been arrested and tortured were released.
Following stage-managed televised
"confessions" by three haggard westerners in February, Saad al-Faqih, head
of the London-based Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, said: "The government
knows it was jihadi groups behind all these four attacks. They just do
not dare to admit it."
Bomb-throwing is only part of the
picture of growing civil unrest in Saudi Arabia. Prince Naif concedes that
100 of the men held by the US at Guantanamo are Saudis.
But not all the young Islamist extremists
can be exported. Just before Christmas, 1,000 young men were reported to
have rioted in Jeddah. In the heavily repressed Saudi polity, this kind
of behaviour can be seen as a grave sign. The bombings of the expatriates,
analysts think, may be only one of several signs that the internal pot
may now be starting to boil over.
