Roger Harrison, Arab News
 Police have arrested three men suspected of involvement in the killing of French engineer Laurent Barbot in Jeddah early Sunday morning. The Ministry of Interior spokesman, Brig. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, confirmed the arrests. "Three suspects were arrested and police are still searching for a fourth," he said yesterday. The arrests, based on evidence at the site of the shooting near Giant Stores in the Al-Zahra district, led the police to Bahra, a suburb some 25 kilometers east of Jeddah. The suburb is home to a mixture of middle and low-income Saudis and is notorious for large numbers of illegal immigrants, many of whom work on nearby farms and in factories and shops.
| Wonder if alk-runners live there as well. |
Al-Turki confirmed that the suspects were traced to Bahra area and that their house and the surrounding area were searched. An area around the house owned by the fourth suspect — whom police described as an Arab national — was surrounded and sealed off.
Police moved in and made the arrests and a search of the premises revealed no weapons. The three who were arrested are, according to police, "closely related to each other." | "Hi, I'm Abdul. This is my brother Abdul and that there is my other brother Abdul." |
Daniel Cousin, who began work in Jeddah less than two weeks ago, is convinced that Jeddah is still a relatively safe place to be in. "I feel safer in the Middle East than in some parts of Paris," he told Arab News.
| Some of those Parisian suburbs can be pretty nasty, eh Daniel? Never know what kind of folks you might encounter. |
He was formerly a hotelier in Baghdad in the 1980s where he survived a bombing.
"The French community was really shocked by the attack," said Jean-Louis Obeda, chairman of the French community group, Maison des Francais. "But it is not panicking over it. We had come to think of ourselves as privileged since France did not support the war in Iraq."
| Isn't that a telling statement! |
He felt that there had been no change in the commitment of French business to the Kingdom. "However, I sense that French companies will be sending fewer nationals to work in Saudi Arabia," he said. Maison des Francais has received no special instructions from the consulate as they are still waiting to find out who was responsible for the shooting before taking any action. |