The Independent, America's fortunes in the Gulf were in free-fall yesterday after a suicide bombing in Riyadh late on Saturday that appeared to be aimed at undermining the Saudi monarchy, the United States' key ally in the region.
No one had claimed responsibility by last night, but the shadow of the fugitive Saudi national Osama bin Laden hangs over the outrage. At least 17 people, many of them Arab expatriates, were killed and 120 others, 36 of them children, were injured in a massive car bomb attack on a residential compound in Riyadh.
Those killed included Saudis, Sudanese and Egyptians. No Westerners were believed to have died. Among the wounded were Americans and Canadians, as well as people from Africa, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey, Pakistan, Romania and Sri Lanka. Two Britons who lived in the compound were found unhurt.
The bombing came a day after American, British and other Western diplomatic missions were closed because of warnings of an attack. Western diplomats believe that as many as 30 people may have been killed in the bombing.
“We pulled out eight bodies from the rubble,” a Filipino rescue worker at the scene of the blast told The Independent. “Most of them were children.”
The attack, the second spectacular suicide bombing in the Saudi capital in six months, was made by a person driving a stolen police car. It caused utter devastation, razing eight villas and blowing out the windows of buildings over an area covering a square mile.
A day before the previous bombings on 12 May, a Saudi Islamist group believed to be close to Bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network called for revenge attacks on US interests after a huge arms seizure from Islamic militants in Riyadh. Hours before the latest bombing, the same organisation
