Iraq: A French man was shot dead in the Saudi city of Jeddah yesterday in the second such killing this month by suspected al-Qaeda militants trying to drive westerners out and destabilise the oil superpower.
Saudi authorities said "terrorists" were likely to be behind the killing of the Frenchman, who worked for a defence company.
Police sources said the shooting of Mr Laurent Barbot (41) occurred at around 1 a.m. local time as the victim - a resident of the kingdom - was in his car near a late-night supermarket.
They said Mr Barbot, a technician who worked for French defence electronics company Thales, was dead on arrival at hospital with two gunshot wounds, one to the chest.
A Saudi security official said suspected militants loyal to al-Qaeda might be behind the shooting, the first such fatal attack on a westerner in the cosmopolitan Red Sea city of Jeddah which has been relatively immune to al-Qaeda attacks.
"There is a strong possibility that this is a terrorist attack," said a spokesman at the Interior Ministry, Brig-Gen Mansour Turki.
The Frenchman was the latest westerner with defence links to be killed in Saudi Arabia.
In August, Mr Tony Higgins, an Irish civil engineer who worked for a Saudi firm, was shot dead in his office in Riyadh.
In June, Saudi gunmen killed Mr Simon Cumbers, an Irish cameraman working for the BBC, and seriously wound his British colleague in Riyadh.
Three Americans working for US defence contractors were killed in Riyadh in June, and earlier this month a British man working for electronics company Marconi was shot dead in the Saudi capital.
An al-Qaeda statement claiming responsibility for the attack said the "crusader" company was providing services to Saudi Arabia's national guard.
Thales managing director Mr Jean-Paul Perrier expressed shock, but said the company would maintain its 250 expatriate employees in Saudi Arabia despite Mr Barbot's killing.
Saudi Arabia's rulers believe they have broken the back of an al-Qaeda insurgency by waging a security crackdown recently, killing and arresting militants after months of suicide bombings and bloody clashes.- (Reuters)