RIYADH, May 13: Armed guards and high walls around fortified compounds gave scant protection to expatriates living in the Saudi capital Riyadh when suicide bombers shot their way into three complexes to set off huge car bombs.

By residents’ accounts, the attackers appeared to have driven through the gates of the three housing compounds, guns blazing, and charged past armed guards in a hail of automatic fire before detonating massive charges aboard their vehicles.

Police and soldiers milled about mangled cars and destroyed buildings, collecting evidence from mounds of debris and surveying the extensive damage.

Helen, an Australian, told CNN trucks rammed into gates at her walled and guarded compound and exploded after an exchange of gunfire, shaking her sturdy villa like a cardboard box.

In one compound, the entire facade had been ripped off apartment blocks. A clock stood still at 32 minutes to midnight.

“I woke up from a big bang and I found my husband lying on the floor beside me. The windows were all gone,” one unidentified South African woman told Al Arabiya television.

Her husband spoke to the channel as a stream of blood trickled down his leg: “What can I tell you? Lots happened, and it happened so quickly...Basically everything’s destroyed.”

Charred vehicles, their frames twisted and still smouldering, littered the compounds, made up of villas and four-storey apartment blocks.

Many balconies were blown off, their truncated steel girders jutting into the night sky. The bombs also gouged massive holes in many walls and felled roofs, destroying water storage tanks.

Rubble, tyres and the shattered limbs of trees filled a swimming pool at one compound while the collapsed concrete and metal gate of another hung limply above the remains of a car.

At the third blast site — a group of low-rise blocks surrounded by piles of debris — the explosion caused a large crater in the pavement in front of the buildings, from which the facades had been ripped off by the blast.

“We were sleeping when we were woken up by the sound of gunfire,” Nick, a European, told the Arab News newspaper. “Moments later, a loud explosion was heard followed by another bigger explosion.”

A U.S. official said one of the compounds housed employees of Vinnell Corp., a US defence contractor which trains the Saudi National Guard. The others — al Hamra and al Jadwal complexes — housed Saudis and Arab, American and other foreigners.

Witnesses and the Saudi interior minister said the attacks were in the Riyadh districts of Gharnata, Ishbilya and Cordoba.

US WARNINGS: Three bombs that ripped through expatriate residential compounds in Riyadh on Monday came despite repeated US warnings of imminent “terrorist attacks on American interests” here.

Well over a dozen armed militants were known to be on the run in the Saudi capital after escaping a police dragnet launched after a shootout with security forces here last week.

Searches of their hideout and getaway car netted a huge cache of explosives and munitions, cash and disguises, which the Saudi authorities acknowledged were intended for use in attacks on Western interests by what it described as a “cell” of Al Qaeda network.

Notwithstanding repeated appeals to the public to help track down the wanted militants, just one has so far surrendered, Interior Minister Prince Nayef acknowledged Tuesday.

“It is our duty to prepare the means to terrorise the enemy,” the Mujahedeen in the Arabian Peninsula said Sunday.—AFP