Riyadh bomb toll hits 17
2003-11-10 06:26
Riyadh - Seventeen people, including five children, were killed in a midnight suicide bombing that ripped through a residential compound west of Riyadh, the Saudi interior ministry said late on Sunday.
The dead included seven Lebanese, four Egyptians, one Saudi and one Sudanese, said a ministry official quoted by state-run Saudi TV and the Saudi Press Agency.
The nationalities of the remaining four fatalities have not yet been determined, he said.
He said the death toll rose from the 11 given by the ministry hours earlier after rescue workers found more bodies in the rubble of the al-Muhaya compound devastated by Saturday night's car bombing.
"The search and investigation are continuing, and a follow-up statement will be issued in due course," the official added, suggesting the toll might rise further.
The ministry did not give a figure for the wounded in the latest statement but it had earlier put them at 122.
It said the wounded included Bangladeshis, Egyptians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Filipinos, Indians, Indonesians, Jordanians, Lebanese, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Romanians, Saudis, Sri Lankans, Sudanese, Syrians and Turks, as well as Americans and Canadians, most of them of Arab descent.
25 in hospital
Most of those injured were lightly wounded, an interior ministry official said, but 25 people remained in hospital on Sunday evening.
The ministry's breakdown of the injured included four Arab Americans and six Canadians, five of whom are of Arab extraction.
As well as the death toll, Lebanese also topped the list of wounded at 53, followed by 17 Egyptians and eight Jordanians. Thirty-six of the wounded are children, and the male-female ratio is 66-56.
Residents of the al-Muhaya compound rocked by the car bomb are of various nationalities, mostly Arab expatriates, the ministry official said.
An Egyptian mother, father and two children perished in the blast and were found on Sunday under the debris, Cairo's embassy told reporters.
The 40-year-old father was named as engineer Ali Ragheb, whose children Omar and Ahmed were aged eight and four.
Seventeen Egyptians were hurt, including nine children, the mission said.
A Lebanese woman and two children also died in the blast, Beirut's embassy said on Sunday before seven Lebanese were confirmed dead.
Saudi officials blamed the al-Qaeda terror network for the attack, which came six months after similar suicide bombings against three residential compounds in the Saudi capital left 35 dead.
- AFP