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Fourth Frenchman dies after Saudi ambush
By Lydia Georgi
AFP
MEDINA, Saudi Arabia
Petroleumworld.com 02 28 06
A French teenager wounded in an attack that killed three compatriots in Saudi Arabia lost his fight for life Tuesday amid shock over the first strike against Westerners in months.
The 17 year old, whose father was also killed in the ambush, died after undergoing surgery to extract a bullet from a lung overnight.
"He passed away now," the director of King Fahd Hospital in the Muslim holy city of Medina, Mutawakkel Faleh Hajjaj, told AFP.
The youngster's age had earlier been given as 22 but a French diplomatic source said he was just 17.
The four French expatriates were killed by masked gunmen near Medina on Monday as they stopped en route to their homes in the capital Riyadh after a trip to the historical site of Madain Saleh, a popular destination for Westerners.
French President Jacques Chirac expressed shock following the attack, the first in three months against Westerners in the oil-rich kingdom, which was rocked by a spate of bombings and shootings blamed on suspected Al-Qaeda militants starting in May 2003.
Chirac "firmly condemns this hateful act," said a statement from his office.
The Saudi state news agency SPA said Chirac on Tuesday received a phone call from King Abdullah, expressing Saudi Arabia's condolences to the families of the victims and the French people.
"Whoever carried out this terrorist act against innocent people represents only himself and will not escape the hand of justice," the SPA statement said, quoting the Saudi monarch.
The dead were among nine French expatriates who were ambushed in a desert area some 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Medina.
Two of them died on the spot, Hajjaj said. A third victim was driven to a nearby medical centre by his wife in defiance of a ban on women driving in conservative Saudi Arabia but was pronounced dead on arrival.
One of the survivors recounted how hooded gunmen had got out of a jeep and then opened fire on the men in the group as they stopped to picnic on their way back from Madain Saleh, said Dr Khaldoun Mounla, medical counsellor for the French consulate in the Red Sea city of Jeddah.
Three women, including the dead 17 year old's mother, an 11-year-old girl and a 15-year-old boy were not targeted, he said.
A French source said the two were siblings.
Saudi security men were posted at the hotel in Medina where the traumatised survivors and French diplomats spent the night.
A French diplomatic source said that the survivors were then taken back to Riyadh on a special flight arranged by the Saudi authorities.
The group were all members of three families. Two of the victims worked for electric firm Schneider and the third was a teacher at a French school in Riyadh.
In France, two victims were named as Jean-Michel Novella, 43, and Jean-Marc Bonnet, both came from the around the southeastern city of Grenoble.
Jean-Michel's mother Gisele Novella quoted her daughter-in-law who survived the attack as saying that the gunmen demanded the nationality of the victims.
They killed them as they responded "French," she added.
Between 4,000 and 5,000 French nationals live in Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi interior ministry said the victims were shot dead on the road between Medina and the northwestern city of Tabuk.
"A group of French residents including four men, three women and two children came under fire from an unidentified car while on their way back from a trip and as they stopped in a desert area for rest," it said.
The attack was the first to target Western expatriates since a Briton was wounded in a knife attack in November in the eastern industrial city of Jubail.
Laurent Barbot, a 45-year-old French engineer who worked for electronics group Thales in Jeddah, was shot dead in September 2004.
The same month, a British national was killed in a shooting in Riyadh.
The attacks subsided after security forces launched a relentless crackdown on suspected sympathisers of Al-Qaeda in the Gulf country, homeland of the network's fugitive leader Osama bin Laden.
But gunfights between security forces and militants continue despite periods of calm.
In December, gunmen killed two policemen in the centre of the Saudi commercial capital of Jeddah before escaping through a security cordon thrown up around their hideout.
AFP 271911 GMT 02 07
Copyright© 1999 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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