Americans in Saudi city urged to go home

YANBU, Saudi Arabia — The U.S. ambassador traveled to this Saudi oil-industry city Monday with a simple message for the gathered Americans: Go home. We cannot protect you.

Huddled in a meeting room in a Holiday Inn still pocked with bullet holes after the latest in a string of attacks on Westerners killed two Americans and four others, many said they would heed his words.

The first to go were among the 90 foreign employees of ABB Lummus Global Inc., a Houston-based oil contractor whose offices were attacked Saturday by four gunmen trying to encourage Saudis to join the resistance against the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The Saudi interior minister said early Tuesday that the attack appeared to have been carried out by al-Qaida. Arriving in Kuwait City for a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Prince Nayef was asked whether Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was responsible.

"Yes, but we need time to confirm this," he said.

The first ABB employees — all Europeans — boarded a van for the Yanbu airport Monday night.

"Money is money, but it's not worth your life," said Armando Rosiglioni, 63, of Venice, Italy, who arrived in Yanbu 10 days ago on a three-month contract. "I don't want to take a stupid risk."

He said a charter flight would take the employees to the Red Sea port of Jiddah, 220 miles to the south, where they were to take commercial flights to their destinations on Tuesday.

A Western diplomat and an ABB official said all foreign ABB employees and their families would depart on chartered flights by Tuesday.

Journalists were barred from the meeting between Ambassador James C. Oberwetter and Yanbu's American community. But Oberwetter later told a news conference that he had encouraged the families to leave the country.

"While we are doing this urging, the U.S. government is not in a position to cause that to happen," he said. "Those are individual decisions by private Americans and by those companies."

People who attended the meeting said the ambassador spoke bluntly. His message was, "It is time for us to pack our bags and go home. . . . We cannot protect you here," said a teacher at a local American school. A colleague nodded in agreement.

Reflecting the tense climate in Yanbu, the two women — like many foreigners — refused to give their names.