RIYADH, 5 August 2004 — Security agencies had begun investigating the killing of an Irishman here on Tuesday as the motive for the murder remained unclear. The killing came after a lull in violence since the local chief of the Al-Qaeda terror network was shot dead in mid-June.
“There is a fear that we are back to square one,” a Western diplomat said yesterday, requesting anonymity.
In Makkah, security officers seized two suspected vehicles on Tuesday as they besieged a housing area in Aziziya District in their bid to track down wanted terrorists.
Informed sources said police found two bombs, two guns, including a Kalashnikov, left by wanted suspects near a residential tower in Makkah.
Although the motives for Tuesday’s murder were not immediately clear, it appeared to put an end to the unannounced pause in attacks on Western residents of the Kingdom last spring.
Riyadh’s police chief said late on Tuesday that an Irish resident had been found dead “in his office in the premises of a commercial enterprise.”
The Irish Foreign Ministry named the victim yesterday as Anthony Christopher Higgins, who worked as a civil engineer in Riyadh. The Irish Embassy, when contacted by Arab News yesterday, said it had no further comments.
The daily Al-Riyadh newspaper reported that at the time of the killing two other employees were present at the offices of the Rocky Company for Trading and Contracting, located in the city’s east ring road.
However, neither of the two men, a Saudi and a Filipino, heard the sound of gunshots, the report said. The newspaper said Christopher was killed by several shots to the head.
Asharq Al-Awsat, a sister publication of Arab News, quoted witnesses as saying they saw two men enter the company building “in a normal way after distracting the Nepalese guard.”
Al-Riyadh said the Saudi and Filipino employees were being questioned.
Even before the lull was shattered, Western embassies had not lowered the level of alert advised to their nationals in Saudi Arabia.
The killing of the militants’ local chief Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin “must have weakened Al-Qaeda ... but it is a big organization,” the diplomat said.
“No one expected this (attacks) to go away ... It should not surprise us if Al-Qaeda was behind” the Irishman’s slaying, said another Western diplomat, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
The break in attacks raised cautious optimism that Al-Qaeda sympathizers had been weakened after security forces gunned down Muqrin and three associates in Riyadh on June 18.
The four were shot dead shortly after they publicized pictures of the beheading of American engineer Paul Johnson, who had been abducted in the capital.
“Such killing (of the leader) must knock any organization off balance but it would not stop it,” the diplomat said. “We believe that more attacks are likely to happen.”
They thought it was too early to conclude that Al-Qaeda has been drastically weakened by the government’s crackdown on its followers, particularly “when 12 of the most-wanted are still at large.”
Twelve militants on the Kingdom’s list of 26 most-wanted suspects remain at large, while the others have either been killed in clashes with security forces or surrendered since it was issued last December.
A one-month royal amnesty, offered on June 23 to extremists who turn themselves in, appealed to only six militants.
Another Irish citizen — a cameraman — was shot dead and a British BBC journalist critically wounded in an attack in the capital city on June 6, just a week after a shooting and hostage-taking rampage in the eastern city of Alkhobar resulted in 22 people being killed, including four Westerners.
Deadly attacks against Westerners which began in May marked a new twist in the campaign of violence launched by suspected militants with a wave of bombings in Riyadh a year earlier.
Some 90 people have been killed and hundreds wounded during the past 15 months.
