Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

KHOBAR TOWERS ATTACK • 353ously involved in the Khmer Rouge. At least 1,800 Cambodians haveapplied to the court to allow them the right to pursue civil lawsuitsagainst the accused in addition to their being criminally prosecutedfor war crimes and human rights violations. The maximum sentenceupon conviction would be life imprisonment.KHOBAR TOWERS ATTACK. On 25 June 1996, at 9:50 p.m., atruck bomb was exploded outside the Khobar Towers apartmentcomplex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, which was being used to houseU.S. Air Force personnel of the 4404th Air Wing serving at KingAbdul Aziz Air Base, killing 20 people and wounding 372 others.The force of the explosion, which occurred 35 yards from the apartmentcomplex, created a crater 30 feet deep and 80 feet wide andtore off the face of the eight-story building. Security guards on theroof of the building, which housed roughly half of the 5,000 Americantroops deployed in Saudi Arabia, saw the truck stop outside thesecurity perimeter and saw the driver of the truck enter another carand speed away. As the guards began to immediately notify residentsto evacuate the building, the truck exploded. While building No. 131bore the main force of the explosion, which tore off the front of thestructure, altogether six buildings within the housing complex weredamaged beyond repair. The size of the bomb was much greaterthan that of the Oklahoma City bombing, which left a 35-foot-deepcrater, and involved military-style detonators and between 3,000 to5,000 pounds of explosives, making it more than 10 times the size ofthe bomb used in the November 1995 Riyadh bombing of the U.S.-Saudi National Guard training center. Investigations revealed that thetruck used in the bombing had been seen on previous occasions andsuspicious activities by unknown people noted on 10 occasions fromApril to May 1996.As a result of the bombing and subsequent investigations, morethan 4,200 of the U.S. servicemen stationed in Saudi Arabia were relocatedto the Prince Sultan Air Base near Al Kharj, located 50 milessouth of Riyadh in a largely uninhabited region.The Khobar Towers bombing was originally widely believed tohave been the work of Iraq- or Iran-sponsored terrorists, althoughothers believe that the evidence seems more consistent with Osamabin Laden’s organization al Qa’eda. Although the Federal Bureauof Investigation (FBI) was called in to investigate the bombing, it