Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Bombing

On November 13, 1995, bombers parked a car filled with explosives next to a building housing U.S. [Page 319]military trainers in the busy commercial district of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital. The car exploded, killing at least six people. The Saudi government later arrested, tried, and beheaded four Saudi men for their involvement in the case.

The American service members working in the building were in Riyadh as part of a U.S. Army-run program that trained members of the Saudi National Guard to use U.S.-made tanks and other weapons. The building, a converted apartment complex in the prosperous business and shopping district of al-Olaia, served as headquarters for the training mission. The United States had built up its forces in the region after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the bombing attack was apparently the work of Saudi militants who violently opposed such a large foreign and Western presence.

At about 11:30 A.M., just as the snack bar inside the complex began to fill up, a car bomb in the building's lot exploded. The blast took off the entire wall of the three-story building and shattered windows nearby. Among the dead were a U.S. Army sergeant and four American civilians; at least 60 people were injured.

Saudi officials arrested four militant Saudi Muslims; after a trial where they were found guilty, they were beheaded according to the dictates of Islamic law. Press accounts indicated that each man confessed and the confessions were televised.

A very similar bombing at the Khobar Towers high-rise military barracks in Dhahran, in eastern Saudi Arabia, followed the Riyadh attack. On June 25, 1996, nineteen U.S. service members were killed when a car bomb exploded near the towers housing the 2,000 U.S. military personnel assigned to the King Abdul Aziz Airbase in Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials indicted 14 members of the Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim group Saudi Hezbollah in the Khobar case; however, officials have not clarified Saudi Hezbollah's involvement in the Riyadh bombing.