The sprawling slum area of south Riyadh where an Irish cameraman was killed and a British BBC reporter wounded is notorious as a hotbed of Islamist extremism and scene of numerous armed clashes. Some half a million people are estimated to live in the poor Al-Suwaidi district where Simon Cumbers, 36, and BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner came under fire early Sunday evening. Security forces set up roadblocks in the area and patrols scoured for the killers who escaped.
Gardner, a Middle East and Al-Qaeda specialist, took his cameraman to film the family home of Ibrahim al-Rayyes, a terror suspect himself killed in a shootout with security forces in the same area last December. Al-Suwaidi has a reputation for deep conservatism even in the traditional Islamic kingdom. It attracts low income villagers from the surrounding countryside - the very people most attracted by the Al-Qaeda call for a better life by ridding the kingdom of corruption and decadence and returning to a pure Muslim faith. Al-Suwaidi is the natural place to go looking for Al-Qaeda sympathisers in the Saudi capital, although the BBC team was accompanied by a minder from the Saudi information ministry which tries to control journalists in the kingdom. Arab News said Monday that the minder, who escaped unhurt, had not sought permission from the interior ministry to "visit a district notorious for frequent gunbattles." | A Saudi press minder, acting on his own? Did hell freeze over and nobody tell me? Didn't think so. |
The daily said police thought the ministry employee helped the journalists "at his own initiative." | Either the BBC crew paid him to take them into a hot zone looking for a story, or he lead them into a ambush. |
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