In probably the first al Qaeda attack against the United States, an obscure U.S. military outpost, the Office of Personnel Management/Saudi Arabian National Guard (OPM/SANG) in downtown Riyadh is attacked, killing six Americans and two East Indian contractors. The 300 lb. bomb was detonated outside the small building housing U.S. military and contractor personnel overseeing the massive U.S. military assistance program.
“Despite demands from Washington that U.S. officials be kept informed, the Saudis quickly shut the door on its investigation.” (Age of Sacred Terror, p. 132). Something called the Islamic Movement of Change took responsibility, an organization thought to be connected to (or inspired by) Osama bin Laden.
“In this case especially, the Saudis, who are secretive by nature, didn’t want foreign police agencies poking into their internal affairs. Indeed their Minister of the Interior compiled a list of several hundred suspects culled from nearly 15,000 files of Saudi nationals who’d fought in or supported the Afghan War.” (The Cell, pp. 149–150).
Four suspects were eventually and officially apprehended, though FBI investigators are denied direct access to them, with those suspects then secretly tried and publicly executed. In the words of Lawrence Wright, “The men read their nearly identical confessions on Saudi television, admitting that they had been influenced by reading bin Laden’s speeches and those of other prominent dissidents. They then were taken to a public square and beheaded.” (Looming Tower, p. 211)
The following people were killed in the terrorist attack on OPM-SANG’s headquarters: Sgt. 1st Class David K. Warrell, James H. Allen, Alaric J. Brozovsky, William L. Combs, Jr., Tracy V. Henley, Wayne P. Wiley, Eyakunnath Balakrishnan, and Thermal B. Devadas. Both Balakrishnan and Devadas were cooks in the building’s cafeteria.