SAUDI ARABIA

    On 22 April Saudi authorities televised the confessions of four Sunni Saudi nationals who admitted to planning and conducting the bombing of the Office of the Program Manager/Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM/SANG) headquarters building in Riyadh in November 1995. They said their disillusionment with the way the regime practiced Islam and Islamic law motivated them to carry out the attack. Three were veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya. The four were executed on 31 May in accordance with Saudi law.

    On 25 June a large fuel truck containing explosives detonated outside the US military's Khubar Towers housing facility near Dhahran, killing 19 American citizens and wounding some 500 persons. Khubar Towers housed US Air Force personnel and other Western military personnel assigned to duty in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province as part of the Joint Task Force/Southwest Asia, which enforces the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. Several groups, both Shia and Sunni, purportedly claimed responsibility for the bombing, including: the "Brigades of the Martyr Abdallah al-Hudhaifi," "Hizballah al-Khalij," and the "Islamic Movement for Change." Saudi and US authorities are still investigating the incident.

In June a truck bomb destroyed the Khubar Towers housing facility near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Nineteen US citizens were killed and some 500 other persons were wounded. (Department of Defense)

    Following the Khubar Towers bombing, a variety of US facilities received bomb threats. International terrorist financier Usama Bin Ladin, for instance, in August and again in November, publicly called on his supporters to attack US interests in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states.