With world attention fixed on the Abu Ghraib prison torture outrage, an important story from Saudi Arabia is going under the radar.
I first saw mention of the more exotic aspects of this story on Raed Jarrar’s blog where he wrote:
The thing no one said about the incident of Yanbu that the dead naked bodies of killed foreigners were dragged over the small town for over an hour, the same way they were dragged around Falluja one month ago, (and maybe as a reaction for the pictures of the naked Iraqi men at Abu Greib prison yesterday).
the four attackers were brothers.
I heard that from two differen individuals from Saudi Arabia, one of them was on SAWA (the voice of america in arabic)
Bush: Kimmitt…
Frog: YES! SIR
Bush: take your soldiers, kill some hundreds of Saudis, arrest some thousands and piss on them, Blair is really creative.
frog: PISS! SIR
Finally some reporters are actually catching up with blogs in figuring out what really happened in Yanbu, though they can be somewhat excused in the case of getting the story out of the Police State of Saudi Arabia. Here’s Adnan Malik, writing for the AP:
Militants sprayed gunfire inside an oil contractor’s office, killing at least six people — including two Americans and three other Westerners — and tying one of their victims to the bumper of a car and dragging it past horrified students at a high school in this western Saudi industrial town.
Police killed the four gunmen in a shootout after a car chase. One of the attackers was reported to be on the Saudi kingdom’s list of most-wanted terrorists, many of them suspects in 2003 suicide attacks on foreign housing compounds in the capital, Riyadh. The two attacks were blamed on al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden’s terror network.
Students told The Associated Press Sunday that bearded men drove a car into the Ibn Hayyan Secondary Boys School parking lot as classes began Saturday, the start of the school week. They fired into the air to attract students’ attention, then urged the boys to go to an Iraqi city where U.S. troops are battling insurgents.
“God is great! God is great! Come join your brothers in Fallujah,” they shouted. Pointing to the bloodied and badly damaged corpse, his clothes shredded, they screamed: “This is the president of America.”
Now, if the War Party were consistent, which they are not, they would have to surround Yanbu with 3,000 Marines and bomb the crap out of everyone in revenge for this dreadful event, but as Raed points out in his Kimmitt the Frog dialogue, the Saudis won’t get the Fallujah Treatment.
Oh, and in their tradition of not giving in to “terrorists” the Americans are urging the evacuation all private citizens from Saudi Arabia and engineering and oil services group ABB Ltd said it is pulling out all staff from the Saudi Arabian port of Yanbu.
UPDATE: Good grief:
Three of the terrorist gunmen who killed an Australian and four of his colleagues had been working with their victims at the same company in Saudi Arabia – and used their security passes to launch the gun attack.