Posted on 05/02/2004 7:16:22 AM PDT by jjackson
JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia -- Gunmen killed four and wounded two Houston-based workers of an international engineering company Saturday. The attackers engaged Saudi police in a bloody battle, shooting wildly in a residential compound and dragging a naked victim behind their getaway car.
In all, the gunmen in the city of Yanbu killed six Westerners and wounded at least 25.
Police killed four gunmen. Saudi officials blamed the attack on Islamic militants.
The attack on workers from ABB Lummus Global's office in west Houston was the latest in a rash of violence against contractors with Houston-based firms working in foreign countries, including war-torn Iraq.
Company spokeswoman Patti McDonald confirmed that Houston residents working for ABB Lummus Global were among the victims, including one who was on life support late Saturday. The company plans to release their identities and more information today, McDonald said.
"We have spent the day earnestly and with as much haste and compassion possible notifying the families of the victims," McDonald said.
The nationalities of the Houston-based workers were not clear late Saturday.
The two Americans killed were engineers for ABB Lummus Global, the energy arm of multinational engineering company ABB. A British ABB employee, a British contractor and an Australian employee were also killed, spokesman Bjorn Edlund said from Zurich, Switzerland.
In Sydney, the government identified the Australian as Anthony Richard Mason, 57. A European diplomat told the Associated Press that a second Australian also died, but it was not immediately possible to confirm that.
One of the attackers killed was reportedly on the Saudi kingdom's list of most-wanted terrorists, many of them suspects in last year's suicide attacks on foreign housing compounds in the capital, Riyadh. The two attacks were blamed on al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden's terror network.
Three of the gunmen worked at the contractor's office in the industrial city of Yanbu, 220 miles north of the Red Sea city of Jiddah; they used their key cards to enter the building and sneak another attacker through an emergency gate, according to an Interior Ministry source quoted by the official Saudi Press Agency.
Witnesses told the Associated Press that police engaged in a shootout with the gunmen outside a Holiday Inn before overpowering them on a downtown street. A statement from the Interior Ministry said police killed three attackers and wounded a fourth, who died later.
"Using different arms, they started firing at the offices of the company's personnel before leaving the scene in a hurry to begin attacking a residential compound," the agency quoted the source as saying.
The Interior Ministry statement said the gunmen walked into the offices and "randomly shot at Saudi and foreign employees." The offices are across the street from a petrochemicals plant co-owned by Exxon Mobil and the Saudi company SABIC. The city of Yanbu and its twin, Jubail, were created along the Red Sea as energy-industry complexes.
It was the second consecutive week oil workers for a Houston-based company were killed overseas. Two died on April 24 when gunmen attacked a boat carrying oil workers in Nigeria.
And with some 34 employees and subcontractors for Houston-based Halliburton having been killed while working in Iraq and Kuwait, Saturday's attack in Saudi Arabia provided another reminder of the increasing dangers faced by U.S. oil workers in the Middle East.
McDonald said the ABB Lummus Global employees had been working in Saudi Arabia for varying lengths of time. They were "involved in upgrading an existing petrochemical facility," she said. The company had 91 employees of various nationalities at the site, she said.
After the attacks, police moved in to secure Yanbu's streets with checkpoints throughout the city, one resident said.
The Saudi Press Agency report said two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Saudi National Guardsman were killed.
The last attack that killed Americans in Saudi Arabia was in May 2003 when coordinated suicide bombings at Riyadh housing compounds killed 34 people, including eight Americans. The second Riyadh suicide assault, in November, killed 17 people.
There was no word on the motivation behind Saturday's shootings, but U.S. officials warned in recent weeks of possible attacks against foreigners in Saudi Arabia, an important U.S. ally. A Saudi diplomat called the attack an "indiscriminate evil rampage."
The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James C. Oberwetter, condemned the attacks and offered condolences to the families of the victims. "The United States appreciates everything the Saudi authorities are doing to fight terrorism, including here in the kingdom," he said in a statement.
Crown Prince Abdullah, speaking on Saudi television, said: "The kingdom will eliminate terrorism no matter how long it takes."
After opening fire in the office, the attackers tied the body of one victim to the back of a stolen car before fleeing, according to a witness who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The Web site of the English-language Saudi Gazette reported that the attackers stripped the man naked before tying him to the getaway car and dragging him along a road. The newspaper showed a photograph of one attacker lying in a pool of blood in the middle of a road, wearing only black trousers and surrounded by a crowd of Saudi bystanders in white robes.
Mohamed Ghamdi, the Gazette's editor, told the Associated Press that the dead man was Abdullah Saud Abu-Nayan al-Sobaie, No. 10 on a list of the kingdom's 26 most-wanted terrorists. The AP was not immediately able to confirm if al-Sobaie was among those killed.
In another, near-simultaneous attack in the city on Saturday, a pipe bomb was thrown over a wall of the Yanbu International School, causing minor damage and slightly injuring a custodian, according to the Overseas Security Advisory Council, which shares security information between the U.S. government and the private sector.
Saudi Arabia -- the world's biggest oil producer -- relies heavily on 6 million expatriate workers, including about 30,000 Americans, to run its oil industry and other sectors. The kingdom produces about 8 million barrels of oil a day, and a significant disruption could affect markets.
Saudi security forces have been hunting Islamic militants, resulting in frequent deadly clashes in recent months.
Last month, the United States ordered the departure of nonessential U.S. government employees and family members from Saudi Arabia and also urged private citizens to depart. The embassy warned of "credible indications of terrorist threats aimed at American and Western interests in Saudi Arabia."
Chronicle reporter Jason Spencer contributed to this story from Houston. The Associated Press reported from Saudi Arabia.
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