50 hostages taken in Saudi attack

Saudi security forces have stormed an expat housing complex where suspected Islamic militants are holed up with a reported 50 hostages after attacking oil company offices.

The kingdom’s de facto ruler said at least 10 people, including a child, were killed in the initial rampage.

At least three Westerners, including an American, were believed among the dead in the second fatal attack on oil industry targets in the kingdom this month.

Philippines officials also were investigating whether two of their citizens had been killed, and there were reports the death toll could be as high as 15 or 16.

A Saudi security official had said the attack was ”definitely inspired by al-Qaida.”

Crown Prince Abdullah said four militants stormed the oil company offices in Khobar and “those killed are about 10 – Saudis and non-Saudis.”

Abdullah, who effectively rules Saudi Arabia because King Fahd is ailing, was speaking at a meeting with professors from King Abdul Aziz University in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah.

“Among those killed was a female child,” Abdullah said, adding the attackers were now surrounded. There had been earlier reports a boy was killed.

A police officer on the scene said the attackers were surrounded on the sixth floor of a high-rise building in the Oasis, a housing complex, and had ”people with them,” meaning hostages.

The officer could not say how many hostages were being held.

But a senior manager of the complex said 50 hostages were being held, among them Americans, Italians and Arabs.

Area residents said the attackers went into a residential building, separated Muslims from non-Muslims and then freed the Muslims.

There had been earlier reports that security officials had stormed the compound and the hostages were freed, but area residents said they had heard the security forces had been driven off by grenades and were awaiting reinforcements.

A report carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, attributed to an unidentified senior Interior Ministry official, said four militants fired randomly at a company and at a residential compound at about 7.30am (0430 GMT), then entered a residential compound “where the security forces surrounded them in one of the buildings.

The three sites hit in Khobar, 400 kilometres (250 miles) north-east of Riyadh, the capital, were a compound of offices and housing for Apicorp, the investment arm of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Companies, the Petroleum Center building that contained offices for various international oil-related companiesand the Oasis residential compound, a luxurious, walled expatriate community on the Gulf.

Among the companies in the compounds are Royal Dutch/Shell Group, Total SA and Saudi Aramco, Lukoil Holdings of Russia and China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., or Sinopec. Shell spokesman Simon Buerck and a Saudi oil industry official, Yahya Shinawi, said employees from those companies were safe.

Additional companies believed to be in the compounds included Schlumberger and INOVx, both based in Houston, and Aveva, of Cambridge, England. There was no immediate word on their employees.

Saudi Arabia relies heavily on 6 million expatriate workers to run its oil industry and other sectors. Many Western energy corporations have offices in Khobar, which is the centre of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry and where state-owned energy giant Saudi Arabian Oil Co. – better known as Saudi Aramco – has its headquarters.

Concern over whether Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, can protect its oil industry from terrorists were partly blamed for recent oil price spikes to new highs.

Peter Gignoux, a London-based oil adviser for GDP Associates in New York, said news of the violence might trigger a further rise in oil prices, but he noted that Saudi oil supplies and export facilities were unaffected.