Canadian Hurt in Yanbu Shooting Improving

Author: 
K.S. Ramkumar, Arab News
Publication Date: 
Fri, 2004-05-07 03:00

JEDDAH, 7 May 2004 — Thomas Washburn, the Canadian oil industry worker seriously wounded when terrorists attacked his company’s Yanbu offices last Saturday, is “slowly but steadily improving” in hospital.

“He’s a little better today, and he’s been taken out of intensive care,” a company source quoting the Royal Commission Hospital in Yanbu said yesterday. He is expected to return to his Canadian home in Fredericton “within a week.”

The other ABB employee injured was Arturo Carrasco, 41, a process engineer working on the project.

“His release from the hospital is imminent,” the source said.

Washburn, who was shot in the neck, lives in Texas and had been working for ABB Lummus as a project manager in Yanbu for only about a week.

Washburn, 40, had some damage repaired in his neck, “but fortunately nothing vital was hit,” the source said.

Although there were some signs that nerves had been affected “we’re hoping in time that will be totally alleviated.”

He was among dozens of people wounded after four gunmen, identified as members of the same Saudi family, attacked the Yanbu offices of ABB Lummus Global Inc., a Houston-based oil contractor, and randomly opened fire, killing five Western oil workers and a Saudi.

The gunmen were later killed in a shootout with police.

The source said the family received “tremendous support” since the shooting, “not only from Canadian officials, who got a visa for us within six and a half hours to visit Saudi Arabia.”

“A lot of credit goes to the Saudi people for making that happen rapidly,” the company source said.

Meanwhile, Asharq Al-Awsat, a sister publication of Arab News, reported that the mastermind of the shooting rampage in Yanbu had fought alongside Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and was wanted by US authorities.

Mustafa Abdul Kader Abed Al-Ansari took part in battles in the Tora Bora Mountains in 2002 before slipping out of Afghanistan into Pakistan and fleeing to Yemen, where he was arrested last year, the newspaper said quoting informed sources at its London base.

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