Posted on 06/07/2004 9:12:12 AM PDT by Eurotwit
Riddled with bullets, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner pleaded for his life in the Saudi capital shouting to bystanders to help a fellow Muslim, a police officer told AFP yesterday.
"I'm a Muslim, help me, I'm a Muslim, help me," the British father of two daughters cried in Arabic, the officer said.
Gardner was stretched on the road, covered in blood from multiple bullet wounds in a slum area of southern Riyadh known as a hotbed of hardliners.
A fluent Arabic speaker with a degree in Arab and Islamic Studies, he was carrying a small copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, a device used by Westerner reporters to try to reassure Islamist militants.
He was gravely wounded and his Irish cameraman Simon Cumbers killed Sunday evening as they filmed near the home of Ibrahim al-Rayyes, a wanted terror suspect killed in a clash with security forces in the area last December.
Gardner was in a coma yesterday at King Faisal Specialist Hospital after undergoing emergency surgery.
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Advertisement "He is in a coma and very critical," one doctor said, adding however that bleeding had stopped and "he has improved in the last six hours."
The 42-year-old was hit by many bullets to the stomach and feet and transferred to the capital's Al-Iman Hospital.
Saudi newspapers reported that the gunmen had left him for dead.
"Frank is in a critical but stable condition in intensive care after surgery," a British embassy spokesperson told AFP earlier yesterday.
Appeasement will be the death of us yet.
How hard it must be to work in a part of the world where one must qualify one's self to get any mercy.
That's too good -- now I'm sneezing coffee.
They didn't believe he was sincere, because he showered more than once a week, on was known to use soap on those occasions.
>If he proclaimed himself a Christian, can we assume they >would have shot him some more?
Uhhh, yeah.
>The very fact that he uttered those words show that he >knows that Muslims want to kill non-Muslims.
Good point, and I suppose in a nice chatty coffee table discussion with his fellow liberal British friends back in jolly ole England, he would have assured them that TRUE Muslims only want peace.
If you read about this on the BBC website you will notice that this is one of the rare occasions in which the BBC do not refer to the gunmen as 'militants'.
AQ's main battles in Afstan was against other Muslims.
Bastards. Seems they love death porn more than humanity
The fact that he was "white meat" outweighed any consideration of his Islamic faith.
---Yes, this is not uncommon in Islam. I have Muslim relatives who were going to travel in the ME shortly after 9/11. They told me this is what they would say ("I am a Muslim.") if they were ever threatened for having U.S. citizenship or "looking like Americans".---
So your relatives were intimidated by Middle Easterners for being Americans after the US was attacked by Middle Easterners? Unf'ing believable.
Having lived in Saudi there is something you need to understand. "In Shaylah" God willing, is in effect. If anyone helps someone survive they assume responsibility for that individual for the rest of his life. Therefore, they stand around and may call for help but that is it. Wonderful society
I don't mean to sound uncouth, but he looks much, much too 'white' and certainly doesn't have enough facial hair to be walking in an area of Saudi Arabia that is known as "a hotbed of hardliners". See, Muslims do kill fellow muslims, regardless of what you may look like and how much you personally believe in their religion. We have plenty of race based crime here in America, why is this any different than a Nigerian tourist walking around South Central L.A., running across the wrong people and getting picked off? It's not,except they probably killed him because he didn't look enough like them.
Maybe a Muslim, but he was a Westerner.
Perhaps the BBC will "get" it now. They want to kill us all.
It is always dangerous to drink and freep. There are enough comedians here to do a Broadway show.
>>>"he's got to spend the rest of his life being muslim or they'll shoot him again."
No more chitlins for this fellow from the BBC.
Hoppy
You mean you did not know that many BBC and Reuters reporters in the Middle East are agents of the Israeli intelligence services?
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