The Iraqi-born American engineer stood listening to two of the four terrorists who had attacked his luxurious residential compound in this Persian Gulf oil center wrangling over his fate.
"He's an American, we should shoot him," he recalled the younger of the two as arguing. He looked about 18 and was wearing desert camouflage.
"We don't shoot Muslims," responded the older man, perhaps 25 with wispy facial hair.
The argument seesawed back and forth for several minutes, both men displaying a certain calm determination. The engineer had a stark example of just how determined they were because a few yards away lay the body of a Swede he knew, oozing blood. Two other militants cradled guns as they paced nearby.
The engineer stood there silently, hoping, praying the older man would prevail.
"I was on the borderline," he said, "but finally the older one said, `We are not going to shoot you.'"
Instead, they gave him a brief lecture about the merits of Islam and their cause, then tried to make him point out the houses of non-Muslim neighbors. He lied and said he had only recently moved there.
The engineer, who has a fringe of black hair and gold-rimmed glasses, only wanted to be identified by his adopted name of Mike because three of the four gunmen remained at large on Monday. He remains too nervous even to have his current home mentioned.
While the 242 residents rescued from the upscale Oasis compound here were departing the country as quickly as possible, the way the hostage drama ended Sunday, with three militants escaping and with 22 people dead and 25 wounded, left more questions than answers in the heart of the kingdom's oil industry along the Persian Gulf.
Many Saudis and expatriates wondered aloud whether the gunmen and the police had struck a deal, speculating about how it was possible that the militants could escape from a walled compound surrounded by hundreds of police officers.
"It makes me very nervous," said Ismail Rahim, a 33-year-old Saudi computer technician.
Mike, the 45-year-old Iraqi-American engineer, said he hadn't expect an attack to succeed inside the heavily guarded compound.
"I mean, until the very last minute I thought the terrorists were security guards," he said.
After deciding not to shoot him, the men tried to justify their cause.
"They told me, `We are here because we want to promote Islam, we don't want non-Muslims to come to our country, we are promoting a Muslim cause,'" Mike recalled.
The gunmen let him go, apologizing as he left that they had searched his house and that one of them had bled on his carpet. Mike went home and gathered some neighbors, calling the American Embassy and the Saudi police to sound the alarm.
He said the police eventually sent around three armored personnel carriers to rescue him and some 15 neighbors.
Since Mike got out, the calls have poured in from friends as far away as Dearborn, Michigan, as well as from family still living in Najaf, Iraq, and from his brother in Baghdad.
"He told me I should come there, it's safer," Mike said.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
RSS