SAUDI ARABIA - May 30 - Militant Attack Results In 22 Deaths; Aramco Vows To Protect Staff & Plants.

Special government forces storm the Oasis housing compound in Al-Khobar to free more than 40 hostages from four radical Wahhabi militants affiliated to Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda. With three of the four militants fleeing, the operation results in the death of 22 people mostly expatriates (see Arab-Islamic Affairs and last week's Recorder No. 22).

The state owned Saudi Aramco rushes to reassure western oil executives that employees and facilities will be protected. Saudi Aramco says none of its staff had been affected by the attack. (Its own residential compounds and oil facilities in the Eastern Province are much more heavily protected. Its HQ and main residential compound at Dhahran is located 15 minutes' drive from the urban area of Al-Khobar in easily monitored open desert. Some 10,000 people live and work behind the security fences in the area, including many of Saudi Aramco's 2,000 North American and 1,000 European employees. Visitors must be accompanied by a member of Saudi Aramco staff, and the company's private police force logs identity details into a computerised security system. The office headquarters is ringed by a steel fence with access through computer-controlled turnstiles. Dhahran has its own shops, school, hospital and golf course. Facilities such as the crude oil processing plant north of Dhahran at Abqaiq, which prepares three-quarters of Saudi Arabia's crude oil for export, are surrounded by a double chain link fence with a security strip in between monitored by closed circuit video cameras, patrolled on the outside by Saudi security forces and on the inside by Saudi Aramco police. Within the plant, computerised control rooms in three concrete bunkers direct the flow of crude oil through vast million-barrel spheroid tanks and processing towers. Outside the facility, all pipelines are buried beneath the desert).