RIYADH, 11 June 2004 — The wife of a BBC correspondent critically wounded in a shooting here at the weekend said after flying into Riyadh from London yesterday that he was fighting hard for his life and she felt better after seeing him.
“Doctors described him as young, fit and fighting for his life. He is working hard to try to stay alive,” Frank Gardner’s wife, Amanda, said.
She said her husband, whose cameraman was killed in Sunday’s attack, remained heavily sedated and did not realize she was at his bedside.
Yet, she told AFP, “I feel much better that I could see him. He always wanted me to come to Saudi Arabia.”
Irish cameraman Simon Cumbers, 36, was killed and Gardner wounded when they were shot by suspected terrorists near the home of a top wanted militant in a southern district of Riyadh.
That was the latest in a string of terror attacks in Saudi Arabia that have increasingly targeted Westerners in recent weeks.
A medical source said Gardner, 42, underwent surgery at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital on Wednesday after a slight improvement in his condition.
Amanda Gardner said their two young daughters — Melissa, six, and Sasha, five — had been told what happened.
According to the news agency report she would never try to stop her husband, a leading expert on the Al-Qaeda terror network who had been reporting full-time on the war on terror, from returning to the Middle East.
“He loves the Middle East so much and feels so comfortable with people from the Middle East that I couldn’t imagine I could ever say anything that would stop him from coming ... He was born to be a journalist,” she said. She said the BBC and the British Embassy in Riyadh had both helped her fly here, and the British broadcaster was “being wonderful” to her.
