Murdered electrician a symbol of hated West

By RAYMOND WHITAKER

You meet many expatriates like Paul Johnson in the tougher parts of the world - middle-aged, overweight Westerners from ordinary backgrounds whose technical skills have taken them overseas in search of an income and lifestyle they could never have aspired to at home.

Right down to his 70s-style moustache, the 49-year-old American electronics engineer fitted the stereotype.

Like other expats whose first union, to a woman from his own country, fell apart, he had married a foreigner the second time around. Often the second wife is a local woman, but that was never likely in Saudi Arabia, where foreigners live segregated lives in compounds.

Instead Thanom Johnson came from Thailand, where the couple were using their savings to build a house.

Men like Paul Johnson used to take it for granted that they could travel wherever their skills were in demand, and that their presence benefited the host country as well as themselves.

But this presumption is being violently challenged by al Qaeda and its affiliates as they seek out symbols of the hated West to attack.

The campaign is particularly virulent in Saudi Arabia, the location of the holiest places in Islam as well as the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and 11 of the 15 hijackers who struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001.

In pursuit of one of al Qaeda's principal aims - driving out all infidels from the kingdom - militants have staged bloody attacks on expatriate compounds.

A week ago, when Johnson disappeared, two other Americans had been stalked and shot dead in the previous few days.

This month, an Irish freelance cameraman working with the BBC's security correspondent, Frank Gardner, was killed when the two were attacked by gunmen. Gardner was severely wounded.

So the engineer's family had reason to expect the worst.

There was never any prospect that the captors' demands for their comrades to be freed from Saudi jails would be met.

Johnson's interest in electronics, which had taken him far away from his modest beginnings in New Jersey, put him into the hands of "barbarians", as President George W. Bush called them.

According to a local saying in the blue-collar towns of the Jersey shore, where the murdered American grew up, "Our creek may be shallow, but our roots run deep".

Johnson bore the same name as his father, a carpenter and clam digger who died when he was a teenager, and named his own son Paul Johnson III. Most of the engineer's family have spent all their lives where they were born - his 67-year-old mother, who was said to be too ill to be told initially of his kidnapping, lives with another of her sons in a trailer park - but he appeared determined to get away.

According to former schoolmates, the young Johnson studied hard while they were playing truant. He tinkered with toy cars and transistor radios for amusement but "set serious goals and would not be deterred", they said.

He commuted by motorcycle to the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark so he could live at home and help keep his family together, but finally he joined the United States Air Force and left, never to return.

More than a decade ago he moved to Saudi Arabia. He liked the desert heat, friends said, and scuba-diving in the Red Sea. But he was not totally isolated from the local culture.

After he was kidnapped, a Saudi who identified himself as a friend posted a message on Islamic militant websites, saying he had bestowed his protection as a Muslim on Johnson and that killing him would break Islamic law. If the American was harmed, he wrote, "I will never forgive you. I will curse you in all my prayers."

He pointed to a saying by the Prophet Muhammad: "If they were granted [Muslim] protection, then killing or taking their money or harming them is forbidden."

The American once sent his sister a copy of the Koran in which he had highlighted passages he considered important.

- INDEPENDENT