RIYADH, 26 January 2003 — Saudi police have launched a massive hunt for four men who shot dead a Kuwaiti and wounded three Saudis, the Deputy Interior Minister Prince Ahmad said in remarks published yesterday.
However, Prince Ahmad admitted the authorities had no information on the identities of the suspects or if they had links to the Al-Qaeda network.
“We believe they are four men... We don’t know for sure who is behind them. We have no information yet,” Prince Ahmad told Al-Riyadh newspaper when asked if the men had links to Al-Qaeda.
Saudi investigators went to a furnished apartment building in the capital’s Al-Maseef District Thursday night to check the identity of the four men for a suspected link to a drugs ring, Prince Ahmad said.
But the men shot at them, wounding two officers and the Saudi owner of the building and killing a Kuwaiti national who was staying in the apartment. The men then fled.
“It was not a raid on the men. It was only to check their identity...and they surprised the policemen by shooting at them,” Prince Ahmad said. One policeman was wounded in the leg and the other in the foot.
Prince Ahmad said the Saudi authorities were still holding “around 200 people” for suspected links to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terror network after they returned from Afghanistan.
He said the number of Saudis who were held for questioning for the same reason was below 3,000, a figure also given by Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal in a press statement.
The dead Kuwaiti was identified as Fayez Abdullah Al-Zaabi, 30 who had come out of his apartment to see what was going on.
The head of the consular department at the Kuwaiti Embassy in Riyadh, Mubarak Al-Adwani, said that the embassy was making efforts to transport the victim’s body to the emirate.
