3 Flee After Hostage Crisis

After killing at least 22 mostly foreign civilians and trapping dozens of people in a 25-hour hostage standoff, three Islamist militants managed Sunday to steal a car, disappear into rush-hour traffic and slip out of the grip of hundreds of Saudi commandos.

The men, who authorities said used hostages as human shields to escape, were still missing early this morning. Saudi security forces searched for the suspects around Khobar, an eastern oil hub and home to a vast community of foreign workers. One of the missing militants had been wounded fighting security forces, an official at the Interior Ministry said.

Saudi Arabia was reeling as it counted the casualties of Saturday’s shootouts and hostage crisis -- four Saudis and an American were dead, along with workers from Asia, Africa and Europe. The British Foreign Office confirmed in London that oil executive Michael Hamilton had been killed, Associated Press reported. About 25 people were wounded in the attack, which delivered another shock to Saudi Arabia’s oil industry and the massive expatriate community that keeps the crude flowing.

Saudi officials said commandos had captured the ringleader of the group, who they said had been on the authorities’ wanted list before the attack.

Responding to analysts’ fears that insecurity could imperil the oil kingdom, officials insisted Sunday that the government could protect its oil interests. The attack would not rattle Saudi eagerness to increase oil output to drive high crude prices back down, officials said. A Saudi proposal to increase production will be discussed this week at the OPEC summit in Beirut.

Early this morning, Saudi investigators tried to decipher puzzling details of the attack. It wasn’t clear why the militants had stormed an oil office compound early in the day, when few workers would be present. Saudi officials could not explain why most of the American hostages, presumably among the militants’ main targets, were set free, or how the gunmen had managed to hide themselves in a region thick with Saudi forces.

“What they want to do, theoretically, is attack oil resources to affect the price of oil and send a message to the Americans that we can [hit] you where it hurts,” said Ramzi Khouri, a reporter with the Saudi Gazette. “But here, they didn’t achieve any of that.”

In an audiotape posted on a website friendly to Islamic militants, a speaker who identified himself as an Al Qaeda leader claimed responsibility for the attack. The voice on the tape introduced himself as Abdulaziz Issa Abdul-Mohsin al-Muqrin -- the fugitive accused by authorities of heading Al Qaeda’s operations in the Arabian Peninsula -- and bragged of dragging a Westerner’s body through the streets.

“The holy warriors didn’t leave any of the hostages alive,” the taped voice boasts. “All those infidels and crusaders who were in their hands were liquidated.”

The speaker assails the Saudi government for providing America with oil “at the cheapest prices according to their masters’ wish, so that their economy does not collapse.” The insurgency would continue, he warned, until the “crusaders are expelled from the land of Islam.”

The violence erupted shortly after dawn Saturday, when gunmen in military uniforms shot their way through a pair of office and apartment compounds for foreign workers. They paused in the streets long enough to shoot dead an Egyptian child on his way to school, and reportedly dragged the body of a British worker behind their car.

Next, the gunmen tried to plow a bomb-rigged car into the luxurious Oasis compound to set off a car bomb, but the explosion didn’t go off as planned, the Interior Ministry said. Instead, they scaled the compound wall and rampaged through the villas and high-rises, firing guns, tossing grenades and taking hostages.

Saudi public support for the Islamic militants has eroded in the last year of bloodshed, as bombs and shootouts have increasingly targeted Muslims, Arabs and Saudis instead of foreign “infidels.” In Saturday’s attack, assailants apparently attempted to avoid killing Muslims. Many witnesses reported that the gunmen were trying to pick out non-Muslims.

An Iraqi American engineer, 45, told Associated Press that four young, bearded gunmen asked for his residency papers.

“They said, ‘You are American,’ and I told them I am an American Muslim. They said, ‘We do not kill Muslims,’ ” The gunmen then apologized for breaking into his home, he said.

The militants also released five Lebanese hostages almost immediately on Saturday. Abdul Salam Hakawati, a 38-year-old Lebanese corporate financial officer, said a gun-toting man in his early 20s told him: “We only want to hurt Westerners and Americans. Can you tell us where we can find them here?”

By dawn Sunday, nine of the hostages had been killed, and some Saudi reports indicated that their throats had been slashed. A Saudi official said he didn’t have any information about the reports, but added that one man had died from a stab wound in the neck.

Saudi commandos stormed the compound and freed the hostages, including hundreds of people who hadn’t been captured but were cowering in their homes while the gun battles raged. Traumatized witnesses were led away from the scene.

Although the militant group’s alleged leader was captured, his three comrades escaped. There was no word on how many people were killed during the escape raid or how many Saudi troops died fighting the militants.

Saudi forces “realized they were killing the hostages, so they had to go in and storm the building,” said Jamal Khashoggi, an advisor to the Saudi ambassador in London. “The three escapees used a number of hostages as human shields; that’s how they got away. They just had people around them at gunpoint and got into a car and fled.”

The weekend attack was widely seen as an attempt to destabilize the economy and further sour the Saudi-American relationship.

On May 1, a shooting rampage at an oil compound in Yanbu, on the opposite coast of the country, drove many Americans and other foreign workers out of the kingdom.

It is a delicate moment for Saudi Arabia. The price of oil has been driven to a record high, a trend blamed partly on analysts’ doubts over whether Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest exporter, can defend its oil fields from an intensifying Islamist uprising against the ruling family.

The militants call the House of Saud corrupt and apostate. They call for its collapse and the expulsion of all non-Muslims from the land of the prophet Muhammad’s birth. Undermining the economy is an important facet of the battle.

On Sunday, Saudi officials sharply denied the suggestion that the government had failed to protect the oil industry from terrorism. Nail Jubeir, the information director at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, said the militants had opted to attack a residential compound, not an oil production facility. The gunmen were forced to go after soft targets because oil production is “very safe,” Jubeir said on CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.”

“We have been the victims of attacks from extremists, whether they are religious extremists or secular extremists, from inside and outside of the country, since the beginning of the state,” he said. “So we have protected all these installations.”