RIYADH, 23 February 2003 — The shooting of Robert Dent, a commercial officer at the BAE Systems, should not be seen as a premeditated act targeting BAE employees, according to Walid A. Abukhaled, head of corporate PR and communications Middle East at BAE Systems.
He said the fact that an employee of BAE was fired on by a sniper in the northern garrison town of Tabuk and another attacked in Khamis Mushayt last week did not indicate that the culprits targeted the staff of any particular organization.
Dent, 37, was shot dead at close range by a Saudi gunman as he was waiting at a traffic light on his way home from a shopping trip in the Gornatah Quarter in eastern Riyadh. Saud ibn Ali ibn Nasser, a 30-year-old Yemen-born naturalized Saudi, is now being interrogated by Saudi police. Dent, from Southport UK, had been working for BAE for 10 years.
Dent’s killer is suspected of having links to Al-Qaeda. Saudi security forces said that Ibn Nasser had recently traveled to Pakistan and named his youngest son Osama.
“We don’t know for sure, but he could possibly be linked to Al-Qaeda,” one source said.
Abukhaled of BAE said the random shooting would not have an impact on the company’s operations. “In fact, we have 58 different activities lined up this year. So we won’t be winding down our operations in any way.”
However, in line with the advisory of the British Embassy in Riyadh, a majority of the families of BAE’s 2,400 British employees have decided either to go back home or not to return at the end of the Eid Al-Adha holidays.
A source at British Airways in Riyadh told Arab News that incoming flights from London were returning with fewer passengers than normal, indicating that some British expatriates or their dependents had decided to stay back pending a resolution of the Iraqi crisis.
Abukhaled said the Riyadh shooting incident was un-Islamic and alien to Saudi culture and traditions. He cited reports in the Arabic press which said that the imams of some mosques referred obliquely to the tragedy and condemned the act as wholly un-Islamic.
Nigel Perry, managing director of a PR firm based in Dubai Media City, said the shooting incident did not make Riyadh more dangerous than the streets of London. “However, what is remarkable this time is that the shooting incident has been reported in the local media. In the past such announcements were always delayed,” he added.
Perry, a frequent visitor to Riyadh for 21 years, said one of the factors that could have triggered the attack was the sharp increase in the Israeli killings of Palestinians. “There seems to be a definite link to the Arab-Israeli conflict,” he said.
