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| Arabia |
| Thugs in Riyadh kill one, wound three... |
| 2003-01-25 |
| Saudi security forces are hunting for four gunmen who killed a Kuwaiti man and wounded three Saudis during a police check in the capital Riyadh. The Saudi interior ministry said the shooting happened on Friday night at an apartment block in Riyadh's Al-Masyaf neighbourhood. They weren't running alk this time? The leader of the main Saudi Islamic opposition movement in London described the incident as a police raid on a group of "pro-jihad (holy war)" lunatics men. An interior ministry statement carried by the official Saudi news agency SPA said police came under fire when they went to check the identities of several suspects at the complex, and two officers were wounded. One policeman was hit in the thigh, another in the foot, preventing them from pursuing the gunmen. As the gunmen fled the apartment they also shot a Kuwaiti national who had left his apartment to see what was going on, the statement said. "Hey, what's goin' on out there? Ow!" A Saudi man standing outside his home near the complex was also lightly wounded in the shooting, it added. "Hah! Y'missed me, bitch! (Ooh! My, that hurt!) " The shooting happened a day after Saudi Arabia extradited a self-confessed Kuwaiti supporter of the al-Qaeda network, who admitted ambushing two Americans near the main US army base in Kuwait. Oh, is that what caused it? Saad al-Faqih, head of the London-based opposition Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (Mira), said the Saudi police raid on Friday targeted suspected al-Qaeda members. In an interview with Qatari-based al-Jazeera television, he claimed that Saudi police morale had "collapsed" since "pro-jihad men" had received a fatwa, or religious decree, "ordering them not to surrender or be taken prisoner". Their religious leaders had told them "to use weapons only if the police attack them," Mr al-Faqih said. "That's right. You guys fight to the last man, and save the last bullet for yourselves... Now, I wonder what's for lunch?" Commenting on the Riyadh shooting, the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister, Prince Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz, said the authorities were still holding about 200 people suspected of links with al-Qaeda. But he told the newspaper Al-Riyadh that the authorities had not yet identified the four gunmen - believed to be Saudis. Since the local thugs normally don't shoot up the place, maybe the interior ministry will want to hop right on that little chore... |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |