By Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post
Ali Fraidoon, The Associated Press
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A known al-Qaida cell headed by a veteran Saudi militant who trained in Afghanistan carried out the coordinated car bombings that killed at least 29 people, including eight Americans, in Riyadh, Saudi officials said yesterday.
The death toll includes the nine bombers.
The ferocious explosions, which erupted in the Saudi capital just before midnight Monday, destroyed buildings and homes in three compounds inhabited by Americans and other Westerners. More than 190 people were injured in the nearly simultaneous blasts, many so seriously they were not expected to live, the Saudi Interior Ministry said, warning that the final death toll could surpass 100.
The al-Qaida cell believed responsible for the bombings was formed in Saudi Arabia after the Sept. 11 attacks and was led by Khaled al-Jehani, 29, a Saudi who assumed a leadership position in the organization after the capture last November of Abd al-Rashim al-Nashiri, a key planner of the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen, Saudi officials said.
President Bush vowed that those responsible will be tracked down, and he depicted the bombings as another chapter in the war with terrorism that began with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed about 3,000 people.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who arrived here yesterday for a previously planned visit, toured one of the devastated sites, which was a training and residential complex for a company under contract to the U.S. military.
“This was a well-planned terrorist attack,” Powell said, standing in front of a four-story building whose face had been sheered off by the blast. “Obviously the facility had been cased, as had the others, and it shows the nature of the enemy we are working against. This is criminality and terrorism at its worst.”
The bombings marked a bloody gesture against the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, which has been cited by the al-Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, as the main reason for his terrorism campaign against the United States.
Bin Laden, a Saudi native, focused his radical goals on the U.S. after U.S. troops remained on Saudi soil following the 1991 Persian Gulf War despite a promise from the Saudi royal family that they would leave as soon as the conflict was over.
Acknowledging widespread opposition to their presence among the Saudi people, the Bush administration announced two weeks ago that nearly all U.S. military personnel will leave by the end of the summer.
Seven of the eight Americans known killed were employees of a local subsidiary of the Virginia-based Vinnell Corp., contracted to train the Saudi National Guard.
In a hallmark of al-Qaida’s previous operations, the three bombings came within a few minutes of each other and all used the same technique. In all three cases, U.S. and Saudi officials said, the assailants attacked guards at the compounds, opened the gates and then drove a vehicle packed with explosives deep inside before igniting the blasts.
Saudi officials said that, in addition to the victims, nine charred bodies were found at the three compounds, believed to be those of the attackers who drove the vehicles as they exploded. Prince Abdullah, the Saudi crown prince and the kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, said the attacks were carried out by suicide bombers whom he described as “terrorists.”
U.S. officials, mindful that 15 Saudi nationals participated in the Sept. 11 attacks, have in the past criticized the Saudi government for failing to investigate al-Qaida support in the kingdom vigorously enough. In particular, they have charged some wealthy Saudi citizens are helping finance organizations linked to terrorist activities.
“The blood of Saudi citizens was mixed in this tragic event with American blood,” he said. “It should increase our efforts, it should make us not hesitate to take whatever measures are needed to oppose these people who only hate, who only kill, and for no purpose whatsoever.”
The Bush administration dispatched a team of officials from several federal agencies, including the State Department, the FBI and the CIA.
But the bombings came just one week after more than a dozen armed militants had a shootout with Saudi security forces here, in the same section of the city as the attacks. After that encounter, Saudi officials announced they had recovered about 800 pounds of explosives, 55 hand grenades, dozens of weapons, 2000 rounds of ammunition and $80,000 in cash.
Saudi officials said they believe the cell responsible for the attacks has at least 50 to 60 hard-core members. Jehani, who ran it, left Saudi Arabia when he was 18 years old and fought in Bosnia and Chechnya in addition to attending training camps in Afghanistan, they said.
The officials said Jehani, who remains at large, returned to Saudi Arabia through Yemen after the American assault on Afghanistan and at first operated under the command of Nashiri, al-Qaida’s former director of operations in the Persian Gulf, who is now in U.S. custody.
Jehani has been on the FBI’s list of al-Qaida suspects since January 2002. He was one of five al-Qaida operatives, including Sept. 11 figure Ramzi Binalshibh, who recorded “martrydom” videotapes recovered from the rubble of an Afghan compound. In one portion of a tape released by the FBI, Jehani is shown caressing and kissing a Kalashnikov rifle before he grins and chuckles at the camera.
The Saudi cell, first under Nashiri’s and then Jehani’s control, had planned numerous attacks in the kingdom in the last year, which were foiled because the group found security too tight at certain installations or a captured member of the cell revealed their plans, according to officials. Among the targets they had selected and then rejected, officials said, was an expatriate residential community in the commercial city of Jiddah on the Red Sea.
Largely on the basis of information on those plans, U.S. officials have been increasingly concerned about security in Saudi Arabia, sending increasingly urgent advisories to the estimated 35,000 to 40,000 U.S. citizens who live here, working in the oil industry or in military maintenance. A number of car bombings against western interests have been reported during the past two years, and two British aerospace workers were shot recently on their way to work.
The State Department on May 1 issued an unusually stark warning that the U.S. had received intelligence reports indicating that militants “may be in the final phases of planning attacks” on American interests in Saudi Arabia.
The site visited by Powell, the Vinnell Arabia complex, is home to more than 500 military advisers who help train the National Guard. Several hundred National Guard troops were in the devastated compound when Powell arrived.
The other two compounds were identified as al-Hamra and Jadawal, which are home not only to Americans and British expatriates but also workers from other countries and Saudis. In the al-Hamra compound, a bomb was detonated immediately outside a pool area where a party was under way.