[pnews-news] Saudi Pot Boiling Over - Caught in Wave of Terror

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,642098,00.html

Caught in Bin Laden's wave of terror

Evidence that shows attacks on expats could be work of al-Qaida supporters
has been suppressed

David Pallister, Paul Kelso, and Brian Whitaker
Thursday January 31, 2002
The Guardian

Throughout 2000 and 2001 a large network of supporters of Osama bin Laden, 
thousands of them young Saudi men, were working on schemes to kill 
westerners. This culminated in the attacks on the US of September 11.

But the frontline of their jihad was always Saudi Arabia, where a 
year-long wave of bombings killed, blinded or maimed several expatriates.

A Guardian investigation has revealed that a large amount of evidence, 
pointing to supporters of the Saudi exile's al-Qaida network as being 
behind the attacks, has been suppressed. All the bombs could easily have 
been planted by Islamists. The Rodways, the first victims, left their car 
parked in the open for 24 hours before a bomb was planted. Noel Rooney, an 
Irishman who found a bomb hidden under his car, had also left it out 
overnight.

Jackie Gill, one of the nurses in a jeep that was blown up on the way home 
from the Celtic Corner drinking club, reported the unusual sight, as her 
party first parked their car, of two Arabs at the gate of the 
westerners-only compound, trying to gain access.

Similarly, the wife of David Brown, a Scot blinded at the port town of 
Khobar, reported that two Saudis had eyed them suspiciously at the store 
where a bomb was subsequently planted on their windscreen. Two Asians, 
possibly Pakistanis, were reported to have handed in the parcel bomb that 
maimed US chiropractor Gary Hatch.

Other bombs were planted in the street, outside a shopping mall and a 
bookshop. And the eighth bomb, which killed a US oil engineer on a busy 
pavement, was admitted to have been the work of a suicide bomber.

Anti-western sentiment, particularly directed at the American military 
presence in Saudi Arabia, has been fuelled for a decade by militant 
dissident clerics. Their calls have found a sympathetic response, not 
least among the 10,000 or so Saudis who volunteered to wage jihad against 
the Russians in Afghanistan.

Last week the Saudi regime conceded the existence of an intelligence 
survey it had conducted last October of educated Saudis aged between 25 
and 41. The New York Times, which disclosed it, said it concluded that 95% 
supported Bin Laden.

Bin Laden's notorious 1996 declaration of war against the Americans and 
their allies in Saudi Arabia, was specifically targeted at young Saudi 
men. It waxed eloquent about "hundreds of thousands of unemployed 
graduates" in the kingdom.

He attacked Prince Naif, the Saudi interior minister, by name for filling 
his jails with the country's "best sons" and provoking the spectre of 
civil war.

And he praised two bombings which al-Qaida supporters had already carried 
out inside Saudi Arabia. In November 1995 a car bomb in Riyadh had killed 
seven people, five of them US advisers. Four young Saudi men had been 
forced by Prince Naif's men to confess and were summarily executed.

The response was a huge bombing in June 1996 near Khobar on the coast, 
which killed 19 US soldiers, and forced them to relocate their base to a 
safer place out in the desert.

Bin Laden urged his men on: "The explosions at Riyadh and Khobar are a 
warning of the volcanic eruption emerging as a result of oppression, 
suffering, iniquity and humiliation and poverty the deterioration of the 
economy, inflation, increasing debts and jails full of prisoners. 
Government employees complain the value of the rial is continuously 
deteriorating."

He issued another statement in February 1998: "The ruling to kill the 
Americans and their allies - civilians and military - is an individual 
duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible 
to do it." This was followed by the US embassy attacks in east Africa, 
which killed 225 people.

The tempo of Bin Laden-inspired attacks in the Gulf did not slacken. On 
August 10 2000 a Saudi student fired shots at expatriates at housing on 
the Khamis Mushayt airbase.

On October 12 in the Yemen, came the horrific suicide bombing of the US 
warship, the Cole, killing 17 servicemen. At the same time, a bomb was 
lobbed over the wall of the British embassy in Yemen.

In November, about the time the US put a price of $5m (£3.5m) on Bin 
Laden's head, and Kuwait seized a large cache of explosives and grenades 
from his supporters, came the first of the series of Saudi bombings 
against westerners.

>From London, dissidents claimed that 38 of their number had been rounded 
up by Prince Naif's men. As the bombings continued, and the Saudi regime 
began rounding up westerners, claiming the attacks were part of "turf war" 
between bootleggers, the Saudi dissidents in London claimed the Interior 
Ministry had received a letter warning that more bombs would ensue un less 
the "mojahedin youths" who had been arrested and tortured were released.

Following stage-managed televised "confessions" by three haggard 
westerners in February, Saad al-Faqih, head of the London-based Movement 
for Islamic Reform in Arabia, said: "The government knows it was jihadi 
groups behind all these four attacks. They just do not dare to admit it."

Bomb-throwing is only part of the picture of growing civil unrest in Saudi 
Arabia. Prince Naif concedes that 100 of the men held by the US at 
Guantanamo are Saudis.

But not all the young Islamist extremists can be exported. Just before 
Christmas, 1,000 young men were reported to have rioted in Jeddah. In the 
heavily repressed Saudi polity, this kind of behaviour can be seen as a 
grave sign. The bombings of the expatriates, analysts think, may be only 
one of several signs that the internal pot may now be starting to boil 
over.




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