US officials discount New York link in Saudi shop blast

KHOBAR - A bomb blast yesterday killed two foreigners in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar, site of an attack five years ago in which 19 United States servicemen died.

US officials said they saw no immediate link with the attacks on New York and Washington for which Saudi-born Osama bin Laden is the prime suspect.

It was not clear if the blast was politically motivated or one of a string of bombings that rocked the conservative Muslim kingdom late last year and early this year which Saudi newspapers linked to a lucrative illegal alcohol trade.

Saudi Arabia has detained several Westerners for those blasts.

In June, the US charged 14 suspected Muslim militants - 13 Saudis and one Lebanese - for the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, and accused elements of the Iranian Government of being behind the attack. Iran has denied involvement.

The Saudi Press Agency quoted a senior police officer as saying two people had been killed and four wounded, all foreigners, in the blast yesterday in front of a shop on King Khalid St in Khobar.

A US Embassy official in Riyadh said one American civilian was killed and another wounded.

"It appears that a pedestrian threw a package bomb into the shopping area ... The motives are completely unknown," the official said.

A spokesman from Khobar's King Fahd University Hospital said the wounded were an American, a Briton and two Filipinos. He did not know the nationalities of those killed.

A witness said as many as six people might have been killed. But a police official at the scene said he believed that number was too high.

Another witness said police later set up checkpoints on roads leading to King Khalid St. "They appear to be looking for a specific car."

The US sought to discount the idea that the explosion was linked to the suicide-hijack assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed nearly 5600.

Meanwhile, Russia awaited answers from Ukraine about a missile fired on the day a Russian airliner exploded over the Black Sea, killing up to 78 people.

Evidence fished from the water has raised suspicions of a Ukrainian military blunder.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov said he had asked Ukraine for information on a specific rocket fired in military exercises when the Sibir Airlines jet crashed.

In a sign that the incident could sour recently improving relations between Ukraine and its former colonial master, Ivanov said Russian President Vladimir Putin was unhappy with the information Ukraine had provided so far.

Putin had spoken by telephone to Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who once managed the Soviet Union's biggest missile factory, and the leaders agreed to co-operate in the probe.

Russia's request for specific information came after investigators said some of the debris found at the crash site, 200km from the training ground in the Crimea, could not have come from the aircraft itself.

The Sibir Airlines TU-154 had been bound for Novosibirsk from Tel Aviv and many of the passengers on board were Israeli citizens flying to visit relatives in Siberia.

The crash raised fears of sabotage, but Washington said a US spy satellite had detected the plume of a missile close to the crash area and discounted terrorism.

An Israeli delegation arrived yesterday in the Black Sea city of Sochi to aid the investigation

- REUTERS

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