BURAIDAH, 21 May 2004 — Four militants and a policeman were killed and one militant and two security men were injured yesterday in a shootout during a raid on a militant hideout in Khudaira, a southern district of Buraidah.
A statement from the Ministry of the Interior said security forces uncovered a group of wanted terror suspects in the Khudaira area.
The statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency said arms and ammunition were later found at the location.
The militants were hiding in a rest house in the rural southern district of Buraidah that is home to mostly rest houses and farms. Some sources said one of the dead, identified as Bandar Al-Dakheel, could be the terrorist of the same name on a list of most wanted militants issued after the May and November 2003 compound attacks in Riyadh that left more than 50 people dead, many of them foreigners.
The sources said others on the list could also be among those killed in yesterday’s gunbattle.
The gunbattle started at 2 p.m. when police raided the rest house where a group of militants were holed up and exchanged fire with them. Witnesses said the militants fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the police. An unspecified number of militants managed to escape.
The officer was killed when a hand grenade thrown by the militants at a police car exploded, wounding the two others. The police car was completely destroyed, an eyewitness said. The dead policeman was identified as Ayedh Awad Al-Harbi.
Khudaira and Al-Salmia, two southern districts of Buraidah, witnessed an unprecedented presence of security and anti-terrorists forces. Police sealed off the area and set up several checkpoints there and in different parts of the Qasim region of which the town is a part.
The area has seen a spate of recent clashes between militants and security forces. On April 21, two Qasim police officers came under fire when they stopped a suspect Toyota truck in a street in the town. The two suspects in the truck fled and remain at large.
It was not immediately clear whether the Khudaira cell belongs to the same group of terrorists who had earlier killed four security men in Om Sidrah, some 45 km east of Buraidah. On April 13, security forces defused two explosive-laden cars in Al-Shumasiah, 30 km east of Buraidah. In the latest of a series of attacks over the past year, militants killed five foreigners during a shooting rampage at a petrochemical site in the western industrial city of Yanbu.
Security forces have killed or arrested eight on a list of 26 top militants since December last year.
— Khaled Al-Awadh, Zaid bin Kami and Abdul Aziz Al-Khushaiban contributed to this report
