SAUDI ARABIA: The Saudi authorities on Saturday found and defused devices attached to the undersides of two cars belonging to Western expatriates working in Riyadh. Michael Jansen reports.
One of the cars belonged to a US citizen employed at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital, the other to a Briton. A circular from the US embassy said a "suspicious object" was "dragging on the road" as the hospital employee and his wife left al-Naqel residential compound where a British banker, Mr Simon Viness, was blown up on June 20th.
The second device was discovered when Saudi police searched other vehicles in the compound. Residents have been warned to carry out thorough inspections before using their cars.
While keeping silent on the latest attempts, Saudi security agencies have in the past blamed such incidents on turf warfare between groups of expatriates brewing and selling alcohol, which is banned.
In the past two years a dozen Britons have been arrested for bootlegging and five Britons, a Belgian and a Canadian are serving long prison sentences.
However, analysts believe that militants resentful of the presence of tens of thousands of Westerners in the kingdom are gradually stepping up attacks with the aim of forcing them to leave. The first bombing took place in Riyadh in 1995. Five of the seven killed were US military advisers. The second, the detonation of a lorry packed with explosives outside a US military barracks, was in 1996, and killed 19 US servicemen.
A British engineer, Mr Christopher Rodway, fell victim to the first bombing against a purely civilian target in November 2000. Since then there have been 10 attempted and successful bombings, maiming two Britons.
In May a missile launcher was found three-and-a-half km from a runway at the Prince Sultan airbase, the US regional command-and-control centre at which about 4,500 US troops are based.
The Saudis detained 13 men, including a Sudanese and an Iraqi, for planning to attack key installations with explosives and surface- to-surface missiles. The Saudis claimed that seven of the men were linked to al-Qaeda the network headed by former Saudi national Osama bin Laden, blamed for the September 11th attacks on the US.
On June 5th an Australian man working for British Aerospace was fired upon by a sniper while driving in the north-western city of Tobuk.
The motive for these attacks seems to be bitter resentment against US policy in the region, particularly Washington's firm support for Israel. Fifteen of the 19 men involved in the strikes against New York and Washington have revealed that al-Qaeda found many willing recruits amongst Saudi youth.
A poll conducted last autumn showed that 95 per cent of Saudis backed al-Qaeda's strikes on the US.
Since last September an organised boycott of US goods has led to a dramatic fall in US exports to the kingdom. From September through to March of this year sales volume fell by 33 per cent, while the first quarter of 2002 saw a drop of 43 per cent.