NZ family quit Riyadh

By JAMES GARDINER

A New Zealand family who lived on one of the Saudi Arabian compounds bombed by terrorists on Tuesday have left the country and say they will not return.

Foreign workers still in Riyadh were yesterday warned of fresh threats of attacks on the compounds, to which they are now confined.

Stuart and Dionne Rennie, both 35, from Wellington, and their three children, aged 5, 3 and 9 months, had the doors and windows of their three-bedroom villa in Riyadh's Al Hamra Oasis Village compound blown out but were unhurt.

It was Mr Rennie who gave the Herald a first-hand account of the night of terror and then went out at dawn to photograph the devastation.

Al Hamra, one of dozens of walled compounds that house up to 100,000 foreign workers and their families in the Saudi capital, is believed to have suffered most of the casualties.

The death toll from the simultaneous attacks is said to be 34, with more than 100 injured, but reports suggested those figures may be higher and Saudi authorities are notoriously unreliable with information that might reflect poorly on the regime.

Mr Rennie said his employer, a Belgian computer company, had booked 100 plane tickets out of Riyadh for its staff and families within hours of the bombings, and they arrived in France two days ago.

He had stayed in Riyadh during the US-led war on Iraq but moved Dionne and the children to their house in France. They had returned a fortnight before the bombings.

Mr Rennie said he would not contemplate returning to Riyadh alone or with his family - "certainly not to live".

"It's really not a very nice place. Just the general feel. You never feel that secure. You're always sort of suspicious of what [the Saudis] might be thinking."

He said Saudis driving by occasionally waved firearms at Westerners.

Mr Rennie was disappointed that Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff had issued a statement on Tuesday saying all three New Zealanders in Al Hamra were safe, when he had registered all five members of his family with the embassy and provided home, work and cellphone numbers, but no one had called them.

"I didn't expect anything from the New Zealand Government at all but if they're going to come out with comments about the facts I'm just a bit annoyed that they don't try to get them right at times like that."

Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Brad Tattersfield said New Zealand Embassy staff in Riyadh reported that they had been unable to contact the Rennies.

The ministry then heard from a relative of Mrs Rennie in New Zealand that they were unhurt.

Of the 450 New Zealanders registered with the embassy in Riyadh, eight were residents of Al Hamra, he said.

None was hurt in the attack but the ministry did not know where the other three people were now.

The ministry has advised New Zealanders not to go to Saudi Arabia. Those there were warned to avoid crowded areas and places where Westerners gather.

An Auckland man, David, living in a compound near Al Hamra, said last night that all the compounds had warned residents not to go out, after new threats of attacks were received.