<font color=red>BREAKING NEWS! Bomb attacks rock Saudi capital</font>
[ed: Where are the clueless fascist neoCON pinheads who thought that Bush's criminal fascism won't lead to more terrorism???? And this is just the beginning IMO. Bush the clueless fascist lying criminal has created millions of new people that hate America. Great job you clueless lying fascist big oil whore CHIMP!]
BREAKING NEWS
NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES
Many casualties reported at complex housing Westerners
msnbc.com
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, May 13 — A car packed with explosives crashed into a residential compound and blew up Monday night, one of at least three apparently coordinated bomb attacks on a large complex housing Westerners, U.S. and Saudi officials said. Witnesses said there were many casualties in the attack, which occurred a week after a spokesman for the al-Qaida terrorist organization warned of an imminent attack against U.S. interests.
FEW DETAILS were immediately available, but diplomatic and military sources told NBC News that the three explosions occurred simultaneously at gated compounds in a residential complex called Garnata, which is in an eastern suburb of Riyadh.
A group of people then tried to enter the compound, and gunbattles with authorities followed, a local reporter said.
Witnesses told Reuters that there were many casualties, although no estimate of the number of people injured was immediately available.
About half of the residents of the complex are Western nationals, a Saudi official told NBC News, including a sizable number of U.S. government workers and their families. Authorities believe the attack was in retaliation for recent arrests of suspected members of al-Qaida, the terrorist network led by Saudi native Osama bin Laden, the official said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell was in Jordan on Tuesday and was scheduled to arrive in Saudi Arabia about noon Tuesday for meetings with Crown Prince Abdullah. Officials traveling with Powell said the secretary would go ahead with his plans.
In a seemingly similar attack in June 1996, terrorists struck the Khobar Towers, a U.S. residential complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen Americans were killed, and hundreds more were wounded.
TRAVEL WARNING
The State Department issued a warning earlier this month advising Americans to avoid travel to Saudi Arabia because of increased terrorism concerns.
On May 6, Saudi security forces seized a large cache of weapons and explosives in Riyadh as they were searching for a number of suspected terrorists, an unidentified Saudi official said.
The official, quoted by the state-run Saudi Press Agency, said at least 19 men — 17 Saudis, an Iraqi holding both Kuwaiti and Canadian citizenship, and a Yemeni — were being sought in connection with the plots.
Only a week ago, a new spokesman for al-Qaida, which is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, warned of an attack against U.S. interests in a series of e-mail exchanges with the London-based Arabic-language magazine al-Majalla.
The spokesman, Thabet bin Qais, was quoted as claiming that al-Qaida had taken a “new form” after its leadership was ousted from its former home in Afghanistan by U.S. military forces.
“The Americans only have predictions and old intelligence left,” al-Majalla quoted bin Qais as saying. “It will take them a long time to understand the new form of al-Qaida.”
The magazine quoted bin Qais as warning of plots “the size of the Sept. 11 attacks” and promising that “a strike against America is definitely coming.”
A senior U.S. official told NBC News that bin Qais was believed to be a credible spokesman for al-Qaida. “He is legitimate,” the source said. “We have to take him seriously.”
NBC’s Charlene Gubash in Cairo, Egypt; Jim Miklaszewski, Tammy Kupperman and Betsy Steuart in Washington; and Robert Windrem in New York; The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report. |
