Raid Qusti, Arab News

RIYADH, 9 June 2004 — Gunmen killed an American by shooting him nine times in the head at his home here yesterday, only two days after a deadly attack on two BBC journalists in the capital.

Riyadh’s police chief confirmed that an American had been killed in a shooting incident in the east of the capital and that an inquiry had begun.

Alerted around 2:30 p.m. to “shooting in a house in the east of Riyadh,” security forces went to the scene where “they saw that the house was inhabited by an American national, who was killed in the incident,” the police chief told the Saudi Press Agency.

The victim’s American colleague and neighbor, who lives on the top floor of the same villa in Abu Taleb Al-Karkhi Street in the Khaleej area, told Arab News he was returning home when he saw his neighbor lying in a pool of blood on the marble floor at the entrance.

“I had just got back to the house when I saw the body on the floor. This was about 2.45 p.m.,” the neighbor said.

The US Embassy identified the dead man as 40-year-old Robert Jacob. He suffered nine bullet wounds to the head, sources at King Fahd Hospital said.

Jacob, who had been living in the Kingdom for five years, was married and had two grown-up children in the United States, the neighbor said.

The victim worked for Vinnell Corp., a US defense contractor, the company confirmed. Seven Vinnell employees were among the 35 people who died last year in a suicide attack on a Riyadh housing compound.

Vinnell is involved in training the National Guard.

Witnesses said the American was followed from a nearby clinic to his villa by two or three gunmen, who shot him inside his house before fleeing the scene.

Al-Arabiya television quoted its Riyadh correspondent as saying that the American had been shot by three gunmen who fled the area in a Lexus vehicle and were being pursued by security forces.

Immediately after the incident, police had set up several checkpoints.

Orange police buses blocked the street leading to the villa in the evening as scores of security officers carrying automatic weapons milled around in the street.

Neighbors described Jacob as a friendly man who got on with everyone.

“Despite everything that has happened here, he refused to leave Saudi Arabia,” a neighbor told Arab News.

“We never had any problems with him during his three years in the villa,” said another.

On Sunday, BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers was killed and its security correspondent Frank Gardner seriously injured when they came under fire in southern Riyadh. Gardner remains in critical condition.

The journalists were attacked in the low-income Suwaidi district, an apparent stronghold of Al-Qaeda supporters as well as a hotbed of low-level crime which has been the scene of numerous confrontations between government forces and militants.

But the scene of yesterday’s shooting was a more upmarket neighborhood of schools, clinics and housing compounds where Westerners live.

The incidents followed purported Al-Qaeda threats to “cleanse” the Arabian Peninsula of “infidels.”

There has been an upsurge of violence in the Kingdom despite a high-profile anti-terror campaign that the government began last year following attacks on residential compounds.

One week ago, gunmen in a GMC Yukon opened fire on vehicles carrying American servicemen on the Al-Kharj highway, south of the capital.

A 25-hour shooting rampage and hostage-taking that began May 29 killed 22 people, most of them foreigners, in Alkhobar.

Security forces captured one of the four attackers in that assault and are still looking for the other three.

On May 22, a German chef was shot and killed outside a bank in Riyadh. The assailants remain at large.

His killing followed a shooting spree on May 1 in which gunmen killed two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Canadian at a petrochemical plant in the Red Sea industrial port of Yanbu.

— Additional input from Mohammed Rasooldeen and Hassan Adawi