AIRO, May 2 — The Swedish-Swiss engineering company whose five engineers were shot to death by Saudi militants in Saudi Arabia said today that it was evacuating some 100 engineers and family members from the kingdom.Posted on 05/02/2004 9:31:20 AM PDT by sarcasm
AIRO, May 2 — The Swedish-Swiss engineering company whose five engineers were shot to death by Saudi militants in Saudi Arabia said today that it was evacuating some 100 engineers and family members from the kingdom.
The company, ABB Lummus, a Houston-based subsidiary of ABB, the giant engineering and oil services firm, gave employees the choice to stay with increased security or to depart and they all chose to leave, said Bjorn Edlund, the spokesman for the firm at its corporate headquarters in Switzerland.
The attackers, believed to be religious militants, burst into an engineering office on Saturday in the Saudi coastal city of Yanbu, killing the five foreign engineers — two Americans, two Britons and an Australian — and wounding three other foreigners.
The gunmen also attacked a residential compound and several other targets around Yanbu, officials and witnesses said.
A Saudi National Guard soldier was killed in the incidents and 19 other security officers were wounded.
Three of the gunmen were killed, according to the Saudi Press Agency. It also reported that a fourth gunman had been wounded and captured and later died.
Company officials said the gunmen were not employees of ABB Lummus, but might have been working for the security firm hired by Saudi Arabian Basic Industries and Exxon Mobil to guard some 50 foreigners working on a refinery in Yanbu, a specially developed industrial city north of Jidda on the Red Sea coast.
The ABB spokesman said the expatriates' work would have to be suspended, but several hundred expatriates working on other projects elsewhere in the kingdom would remain.
The attack in the country's petrochemical hub struck at the very linchpin of relations between Saudi Arabia and the West, hitting the technicians who keep the oil industry and other businesses running.
Crown Prince Abdullah, Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, blamed outside influences, specifically Israel, for the terrorism.
"It became clear for us and I say it, not 100 percent but 95 percent, that Zionists' hands are behind what is going now," he said today.
The attack was the latest in a series carried out against Western and government targets inside the kingdom over the past year. It came less than two weeks after the April 21 suicide bombing in Riyadh killed five people and wounded almost 150.
By hitting at foreigners in a main hub of the world's largest oil producer, the militants struck at the heart of the ties between Saudi Arabia and the West. The United States and other Western nations rely heavily for oil on Saudi Arabia, which in turn needs a large foreign work force to keep the industry running.
The attacks appear to have been aimed at destabilizing the Saudi government.
Heavy barriers now surround most government offices and foreign residential compounds, so attackers are singling out what one Saudi official has called "targets of opportunity."
The militants want to force all Westerners from Arabia, and they label the Saudi ruling family as apostates from Islam because of its close ties with the West.
The initial reports from Yanbu were confused about the number of attacks and about the number of victims, but it appeared that the attack started with the shooting of the foreign workers and then the attempted getaway spread carnage throughout the city.
Local reporters and other news sources quoted Yanbu residents as saying that a number of shootings had occurred around a local American fast-food outlet and an American chain hotel, with a number of people wounded.
A Western resident said a pipe bomb had been thrown over the wall of the city's International School, injuring an employee, but that incident did not seem directly related to the office attack. The students had been told to stay home after the gunmen struck at the engineering office earlier in the morning.
Western embassies and the Saudi Press Agency said that the four people who attacked the engineering office were responsible for all the violent incidents, in attacks that lasted nearly three and a half hours.
The Saudi Press Agency, quoting an unidentified Interior Ministry official, said that three gunmen had used their employee badges to enter the building, then had let the fourth gunman in.
The United States Embassy in Riyadh confirmed the two American deaths but said the victims' names would not be released until their families had been notified. The British Embassy said it was still investigating; a spokeswoman for the Australian Foreign Ministry in Canberra said an Australian, Anthony Richard Mason, 57, was among the dead.
In April, the United States ordered the departure of nonessential United States government employees and family members from Saudi Arabia and urged private citizens to leave. The embassy had warned of "credible indications of terrorist threats aimed at American and Western interests in Saudi Arabia."
A brief report from the government-run Saudi News Agency quoted an official source at the Saudi Interior Ministry saying that four gunmen burst into the contracting building just before 7 a.m. on Saturday.
The gunmen opened fire inside the building and then tried to flee by commandeering vehicles off the streets, while being pursued by Saudi police officers.
According to local press reports, the gunmen separated the Westerners from the Saudi employees and then opened fire on the Westerners.
One of the Westerners was tied to a stolen vehicle and dragged through the streets as the assailants fled, according to witnesses interviewed by reporters from The Saudi Gazette, an English-language paper in Jidda. It was unclear whether the man had survived the shooting, or was dead.
Pictures broadcast from Yanbu showed a security vehicle riddled with bullets, with one bloody leg hanging out the back door. The police sport utility vehicle had been commandeered by the attackers, and then security forces opened fire on it.
Word of the attack quickly spawned gloating remarks on the Web sites that are the haunt of the supporters of Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda. Although the attack could not immediately be tied to Al Qaeda, Mr. bin Laden and his assistants have called on Muslims to attack Americans and other Westerners wherever they find them.
Several postings on the Islah Forum Web site by a man identified as Sohail al-Hakim praised the attackers.
Average Saudis have expressed increasing disgust with militants, taking pains to tell foreign visitors to the kingdom that they represent a radical fringe of Islam
Good. That will make it easier to bomb the country.
Yer kiddin'.
FMCDH
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