“Help Me, I’m a Muslim”
Saudi bystanders passively watched BBC reporter Frank Gardner as he lay bleeding in the street, screaming for help: Help me, I’m a Muslim. (Hat tip: TS.)
RIYADH - Riddled with bullets, BBC correspondent Frank Gardner pleaded for his life in the Saudi capital shouting to bystanders to help a fellow Muslim, a police officer said on Monday.
“I’m a Muslim, help me, I’m a Muslim, help me,” the British father of two daughters cried in Arabic, the officer said.
Gardner was stretched on the road, covered in blood from multiple bullet wounds in a slum area of southern Riyadh known as a hotbed of hardliners.
A fluent Arabic speaker with a degree in Arab and Islamic Studies, he was carrying a small copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, a device used by Westerner reporters to try to reassure Islamist militants.
Al-Reuters reports that the killers separated Gardner and his cameraman from their Saudi Information Ministry guide before shooting them: Saudi Hunts for Gunmen Who Shot BBC Journalists. (Hat tip: grayp.)
British Ambassador Sherard Cowper-Coles said the BBC journalists were with a Saudi information ministry guide at the time.
He told the BBC there was a “serious and chronic terrorist threat” in Saudi Arabia and warned the shooting could drive more Westerners to leave the Gulf state.
A doctor at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital said Gardner had also been hit in the pelvis and leg. “Gardner’s condition is stabilizing after a critical night,” he told Reuters.
The BBC’s head of news Richard Sambrook said the crew were in the Suweidi district, filming the house of an al Qaeda militant who police killed last year, when the gunmen attacked.
Security sources said the gunmen separated the Saudi escort from the journalists before shooting them. Authorities are questioning him for more details.