Khobar Towers bombing

The Khobar Towers bombing was a terrorist attack on part of a housing complex in the city of Khobar, Saudi Arabia, located near the national oil company (Saudi Aramco) headquarters of Dhahran. In 1996 it was being used to house foreign military personnel, including Americans.

On June 25, 1996, per official statement, individuals identified as members of Hizballah Al-Hijaz (Party of God in the Hijaz) by the United States, exploded a fuel truck adjacent to Building #131 in the housing complex. This eight-story building housed United States Air Force personnel from the 4404th Wing, primarily from a deployed rescue squadron and deployed fighter squadron. In all, 19 U.S. servicemen and one Saudi were killed and 372 of many nationalities were wounded.

The attack

According to the United States, a group of terrorists who wanted to remove Americans from Saudi Arabia organized the attack. Suspicious activity was reported in the area of the Khobar Towers compound in the weeks preceding the attack and during May 1996 the U.S. military local area threat condition (THREATCON) was at Charlie, the highest level is Delta, due to the recent terrorist bombing in Bahrain that killed 3 people.

The terrorists were reported to have smuggled explosives into Saudi Arabia from Lebanon. In Saudi Arabia, they purchased a large truck used for sewage treatment, called a "honey pot" by U.S. troops in the area, and converted it into a bomb. It was originally estimated by U.S. authorities to have contained 3,000 to 5,000 pounds of explosives. Later the General Downing report on the incident suggested that the explosion contained the equivalent of 20,000 to 30,000 Pounds of TNT.

File:Khobartowersgroundzero.jpg

The crater

Initially, the attackers attempted to enter the compound at the main checkpoint. When they were denied access by U.S. military personnel, at around 9:43 p.m. local time, they drove three vehicles, two cars and the bomb truck, to a parking lot adjacent to building #131. A chain link security fence and a line of small trees separated the parking lot, used for a local mosque and park, from the housing compound. The perimeter of Building #131 was approximately 72 feet from the fence line, with a perimeter road between the fence and building which was often used by military personnel for jogging. The first car entered the parking lot and signaled the others by flashing headlights. The bomb truck and a getaway vehicle followed shortly after. The men parked the truck next to the fence and left in the third vehicle. The bomb exploded between three and four minutes later at approximately 9:50 p.m. local time.

An American sentry, Air Force Staff Sergeant Alfredo R. Guerrero, was stationed atop Building #131. He witnessed the men, recognized the vehicles as a threat, reported it to security, and began a floor by floor evacuation of the building. His actions are credited with saving dozens of lives. Many of the evacuees were in the stairwell when the bomb went off. The stairwell was constructed of heavy marble and was located on the side of the building away from the truck bomb, perhaps the safest location in the building. For his actions, Guerrero was awarded the Airman's Medal, the United States' highest peacetime award for valor.

Another security measure is thought to have minimized damage. Along the security fence were Jersey barriers, concrete barriers commonly used along roadways. These deflected the blast energy upward, and away from the lower floors of the building, perhaps even preventing a total collapse of the structure.

The crater remaining after the truck bomb explosion, building #131 is on the right

The force of the explosion was enormous. The size of the charge created an intense dust storm as the forces of the high pressure blast wave and the subsequent vacuum forces caused considerable damage in their own right. Several military vehicles parked to the left side of building #131 suffered no direct impact from debris, but were heavily damaged by the sheer intensity of the shock wave.

It heavily damaged or destroyed six high rise apartment buildings in the complex. Windows were shattered in virtually every other building in the compound and in surrounding buildings up to a mile away. An enormous crater, 85 feet wide and 35 feet deep, was left where the truck had been and within a few hours was filling up partially with salt-water from the Persian Gulf, which is less than one mile away. The blast was felt 20 miles away in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain. In the minutes following the blast, the residents of the complex evacuated severely injured U.S. military personnel from the area. With power out in many of the buildings near #131, the scene was chaotic and tense as little was known about the safety of the area from further attacks. Many residents later gathered in the local dining facility, set up as a triage center, and saw breaking news of the event on large projection televisions intended to bring news of events back home to the troops.

The U.S. victims

These are the nineteen U.S. Air Force servicemen killed in the blast.

• Captain Christopher J. Adams
• Captain Leland T. Haun
• Master Sergeant Michael G. Heiser
• Master Sergeant Kendall K. Kitson, Jr.
• Technical Sergeant Daniel B. Cafourek
• Technical Sergeant Patrick P. Fennig
• Technical Sergeant Thanh V. Nguyen
• Staff Sergeant Kevin J. Johnson
• Staff Sergeant Ronald L. King
• Sergeant Millard D. Campbell
• Senior Airman Earl F. Cartrette, Jr.
• Senior Airman Jeremy A. Taylor
• Airman 1st Class Christopher B. Lester
• Airman 1st Class Brent E. Marthaler
• Airman 1st Class Brian W. McVeigh
• Airman 1st Class Peter J. Morgera
• Airman 1st Class Joseph E. Rimkus
• Airman 1st Class Justin R. Wood [1]
• Airman 1st Class Joshua E. Woody

Indictment

On June 21, 2001 an indictment was issued in United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, Virginia charging the following people with murder, conspiracy, and other charges related to the bombing:

• Ahmed Ibrahim Al-Mughassil
• Abdelkarim Hussein Mohamed Al-Nasser
• Ali Saed Bin Ali El-Hoorie
• Ibrahim Salih Mohammed Al-Yacoub
• Nine other Saudis
• One Lebanese man listed as "John Doe."

The remaining five were Sa'ed Al-Bahar, Saleh Ramadan, Ali Al-Marhoun, Mustafa Al-Mu'alem and Fadel Al-Alawe.

In 2004, the 9/11 Commission noted that Osama Bin Laden was seen being congratulated on the day of the Khobar attack, and this raised the possibility that he may have helped the group, possibly by helping to obtain the explosives or the sophisticated timing device used to enable the escape of the perpetrators. According to the United States, classified evidence suggests that the government of Iran was the key sponsor of the incident, and several high ranking members of their military may have been involved. The U.S. government may have been hesitant to more aggressively pursue the offenders within the Iranian military due to the recent rise of a more reformist government and a desire to enhance relations with Iran at the time. This, however, without any proof is pure speculation especially since connecting Iran and Al Qaida is difficult and would require strong evidence. A U.S. federal court has speculated that the Khobar Towers bombing was authorized by Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran.

William Perry, who was the United States Secretary of Defense in the time that this bombing happened, in an interview in June 2007, said that "he now believes al-Qaida rather than Iran was behind a 1996 truck bombing at an American military base."[2]

See also

• Riyadh compound bombings (May 12, 2003). The next major attack, which triggered a second series of terrorist attacks.
• Insurgency in Saudi Arabia
• Eglin AFB

External links

• Bombing of Khobar Towers, Rewards For Justice Program, US Department of State
• Indictment USA v. Ahmed al-Mughassil et al., at the FBI
• House National Security Report hosted at Federation of American Scientists
• Department of Defense Casualty Releases
• [3] memorial site for the soldiers lost in the Khobar Towers tragedy