RIYADH - An employee of an American security company with close ties to the Saudi royal family was shot dead outside his home in Riyadh yesterday.
The American worked for Vinnell, a subsidiary of the defence contractor Northrop Grumman, which trains the Saudi National Guard and has privileged access to thecountry's ruling elite. Vinnell was one of the companies targeted in a triple suicide bombing in Riyadh in May last year when 52 people died.
The dead man, who was not identified, was killed as he got out of his car at his villa in the eastern Riyadh suburbs, local police said. The killers appeared to have followed him on his way home from a medical clinic.
Al-Arabiya television reported that his assailants fired nine shots, two of which struck him in the head.
The shooting came three days after Simon Cumbers, an Irish BBC cameraman, was shot dead while filming an anti-government militant's home in the restive, low-income southern section of Riyadh.
Frank Gardner, the correspondent with him, was critically injured.
A week before that, al Qaeda claimed responsibility for a 25-hour rampage at a business and residential compound in the Gulf coast oil city of Khobar in which 22 people, many of them foreigners, were killed.
An American counter-terrorism official said: "Unfortunately this is a trend we're going to see more of ... where al Qaeda or sympathisers see Western targets as fair, open game in the kingdom and are trying to create an economic exodus from Saudi Arabia."
