Fourth Frenchman dies after Saudi ambush
Pastor Dale Morgan
Tuesday February 27, 6:50 PM
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Fourth Frenchman dies after Saudi ambush*
A French teenager wounded in an attack that killed three compatriots in
Saudi Arabia lost his fight for life Tuesday amid shock over the first
strike against Westerners in months.
The 17-year-old, whose father was also killed in the ambush, died after
undergoing surgery to extract a bullet from a lung overnight.
"He passed away now," the director of King Fahd Hospital in the Muslim
holy city of Medina, Mutawakkel Faleh Hajjaj, told AFP.
The youngster's age had earlier been given as 22 but a French diplomatic
source said he was just 17.
The four French expatriates were killed by masked gunmen near Medina
Monday as they stopped en route back to their homes in the capital
Riyadh after a trip to the historical site of Madain Saleh, a popular
destination for Westerners.
French President Jacques Chirac expressed shock following the attack,
the first in three months against Westerners in the oil-rich kingdom,
which was rocked by a spate of bombings and shootings blamed on
suspected Al-Qaeda militants starting in May 2003.
Chirac "firmly condemns this hateful act," said a statement from his office.
The dead were among nine French expatriates who were ambushed in a
desert area some 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Medina
Two of them died on the spot, Hajjaj said. A third victim was driven to
a nearby medical centre by his wife in defiance of a ban on women
driving in conservative Saudi Arabia but was pronounced dead on arrival.
One of the survivors recounted how hooded gunmen had got out of a jeep
and then opened fire on the men in the group as they stopped to picnic
on their way back from Madain Saleh, said Dr Khaldoun Mounla, medical
counsellor for the French consulate in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
Three women, including the dead 17-year-old's mother, an 11-year-old
girl and a 15-year-old boy were not targeted, he said.
A French source said the two were siblings.
Saudi security men were posted at the hotel in Medina where the
traumatised survivors and French diplomats spent the night.
A French diplomatic source said there was a possibility the survivors
would be taken back to Riyadh Tuesday.
He said Saudi authorities were ready to provide any assistance required
by consular staff.
The group were all members of three families. Two of the victims worked
for electric firm Schnider and the third was a teacher at a French
school in Riyadh.
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Paris and Riyadh were
determined to track down the killers.
"There is naturally a full agreement with the Saudi authorities to find
out what happened and punish those reponsible as quickly as possible,"
he told French news channel LCI.
"This is clearly very serious. There had been no such attack on French
nationals for a long time."
Between 4,000 and 5,000 French nationals live in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi interior ministry said the victims were shot dead on the road
between Medina and the northwestern city of Tabuk.
"A group of French residents including four men, three women and two
children came under fire from an unidentified car while on their way
back from a trip and as they stopped in a desert area for rest," it said.
The attack was the first to target Western expatriates since a Briton
was wounded in a knife attack in November in the eastern industrial city
of Jubail.
Laurent Barbot, a 45-year-old French engineer who worked for electronics
group Thales in Jeddah, was shot dead in September 2004.
The same month, a British national was killed in a shooting in Riyadh.
The attacks subsided after security forces launched a relentless
crackdown on suspected sympathisers of Al-Qaeda in the Gulf country,
homeland of the network's fugitive leader Osama bin Laden.
But gunfights between security forces and militants continue despite
periods of calm.
In December, gunmen killed two policemen in the centre of the Saudi
commercial capital of Jeddah before escaping through a security cordon
thrown up around their hideout.
In December 2004, suspected Al-Qaeda gunmen stormed the US consulate in
Jeddah, triggering a bloody three-hour siege and a shootout that left
five staff and four attackers dead.
The interior ministry announced in early December that it had detained
136 Al-Qaeda suspects, mostly Saudi nationals, in raids over the
previous three months.
Saudi Arabia said in February 2006 that it had thwarted a bid to blow up
the world's largest oil processing plant at Abqaiq in eastern Saudi Arabia.