RIYADH, 23 May 2004 — A German national was gunned down in a drive-by shooting here yesterday while leaving a bank at around 6:15 in the evening, witnesses told Arab News.
The shooting took place immediately outside the Arab National Bank, which confirmed that the man, Jonathan Hermann Bengler, had been inside the bank but refused to comment further. An eyewitness in the bank who saw Bengler make a deposit said he heard shooting as soon as he left.
The German Embassy in Riyadh declined to reveal the man’s name or confirm he was a German national. “We are working very closely indeed with the Saudi authorities and are caring for the victim’s family,” said Elmar Jakobs, the first secretary for political and press affairs. The Ministry of the Interior said the victim was a German national.
A security source said the victim worked for Saudia Airlines Catering.
The scene of the shooting was the Jarir Shopping Complex on the south side of the Riyadh-Dammam highway, at Junction 10 on the Oqbah Bin Nafie Road, in the Al-Hamra district here. The shopping center is popular with Westerners as it contains a large bookstore, banks and several international fast food chain outlets.
According to witnesses, a 1999 Honda was parked near the bank and moved off as Bengler was coming out. Two people in the car opened fire at him, hitting him once in the head and four times in the chest with an automatic weapon before driving off.
A diplomatic source described the shooting as having been carried out “with what seems to have been a machine gun.”
Armored vehicles were brought in and police sealed off the area, cordoning off the strip-mall and preventing journalists approaching. The northbound side of Prince Abdullah Street, the main highway leading to both the airport and Dammam on the east coast, was temporarily blocked.
Plainclothes policemen were inspecting the victim’s dark 1988 Lincoln Town Car.
According to bystanders, the German was a sympathizer with the Arab cause. As the body was taken away in a Red Crescent ambulance around 8.30 p.m., one witness noticed a tattoo on Bengler’s arm proclaiming, “Al-Quds is free”.
No motive for the attack has been established.
However, the incident came just two days after Saudi security forces killed four militants in a shootout north of Riyadh and three weeks after a May 1 shooting rampage in the industrial city of Yanbu that left six Westerners dead.
After Thursday’s shootout, police seized weapons and bomb-making materials, according to the Interior Ministry.
The ministry did not reveal the identities of the five suspects in the raid in a town in Qasim in the interest of the investigation but said they belonged to “the deviant group”, in an apparent reference to the Al-Qaeda network.
Four of the militants were killed and a fifth was wounded and later arrested after a gunbattle in Buraidah, some 320 km north of Riyadh.
Two members of the Saudi security forces — Nawaf ibn Hamad Al-Harbi and Aaed ibn Awad Al-Harbi — were also killed.
Security forces who raided the hideout in the town’s Khudaira district found two pickup trucks, one of which had been used in an April 20 shooting in Buraidah that left a security man critically wounded, according to the ministry.
Security forces found that “the house had been turned into a place for preparing the instruments of death and destruction by rigging cars with explosives and manufacturing pipe bombs,” the ministry statement said.
Some of the equipment seized was similar to that found in booby-trapped vehicles police defused in April, the statement said.
Police also seized two hand grenades, four machine guns, four pistols, different types of ammunition, a large mixer, bags of ammonium nitrate, materials used for making pipe bombs and SR19,823 in cash.
The ministry statement urged the public for its own safety to keep away from possible terrorist hideouts especially during raids as the terrorists open fire haphazardly when surrounded by police.
Meanwhile, Qasim Governor Prince Faisal ibn Bandar and Assistant Interior Minister Prince Muhammad ibn Naif yesterday visited the families of the two dead police officers to convey the government’s condolences.
They also visited the wounded security officers at King Fahd Specialist Hospital in Buraidah. Prince Faisal said one of the wounded officers would leave hospital within a few hours.
He urged Saudi citizens to cooperate fully with security men as they sought to hunt down suspected terrorists.
Over the last few months, police have seized and defused a number of booby-trapped cars, foiling potential suicide bombings of the kind which have occurred in Riyadh.
Some 60 people have been killed and hundreds injured in the bombings, the latest of which targeted a security forces building in Riyadh on April 21.
— Additional input from Roger Harrison and P.K. Abdul Ghafour
