Riyadh, Nov 10: 17 people died and more than 100 were wounded when a midnight suicide car bombing devastated a housing compound outside the Saudi capital, the interior ministry has said. The dead included seven Lebanese, four Egyptians, one Saudi and one Sudanese, said a ministry official quoted by state-run Saudi TV yesterday. The nationalities of the remaining four fatalities had not yet been determined.


He said that the death toll rose from the 11 given by the interior ministry just hours earlier after rescue workers found more bodies in the rubble of the al-Muhaya housing compound in the Wadi Laban suburb of western Riyadh.

The ministry did not give a figure for the wounded in the latest statement but it had earlier put them at 122.

It listed the wounded as 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.

Most of those injured were lightly wounded, the official said, but 25 people remained in hospital last night.
Bureau Report