KUWAIT CITY: A Canadian man was shot dead and his wife seriously injured in a drive-by shooting on Wednesday night as they strolled along a beach south of Kuwait City, security sources said.
The man, identified only as Luke, worked as an aircraft technician at the emirate’s Ahmd al-Jabr airbase, the sources said.
His wife was hit by at least three bullets and was in intensive care in the nearby Al-Adan Adan hospital.
She told police that a car had stopped near where the couple were walking just before midnight and opened fire showering the couple with bullets.
Her husband died on the spot.
The sources did not rule out the possiblity that the shooting was an act of terrorism.
It would be the first murder of a westerner in the Gulf Arab states since the launch of US-led air strikes on the Taliban.
The unleashing of US air power since Sunday on the Taliban and Osama bin Laden have provoked threats of more hijackings and murder.
Osama’s official spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith is a Kuwaiti. On Tuesday he broadcast a chilling warning on Qatar’s Al-Jazeera satellite channel of unending terror and urged Muslims to rise up against the United States.
Abu Ghaith’s former acquaintances say he was last in Kuwait six weeks ago. Press reports have quoted him as saying that 20 Kuwaitis are members of Osama’s Al-Qaeda network.
The security source, who did not rule out terrorism, said the gunman was on foot when he pulled out a pistol and fired six bullets, three of which instantly killed 36-year-old Luc Ethier.
The other three hit his Filipino wife, currently in the intensive care unit at Al-Adan hospital, as they walked through a shopping centre in Fahaheel, a seaside town home to many expatriates, 20 kilometres from the capital.
“The gunman is still at large,” said the source.
“He was wearing trousers and a shirt, but had a ‘gutra’ (Arab headdress) wrapped around his head,” explained the source, who confirmed that Ethier was a civilian working for the US defence contracting company, Dyncorp, at Ahmad al-Jaber airbase.
“We did have one of our people shot and killed last night,” a senior Dyncorp employee said.
Asked if he thought the killing could have been personally motivated, the employee said: “He (Ethier) was one of the nicest guys you ever met.”
The security source, who did not rule out that the shooting could have been an act of terrorism linked to the US-led strikes on Afghanistan, said Ethier’s “wife is doing well today”.
“It’s still too early to tell. We can’t say if it’s an isolated incident or related to Afghanistan. But we don’t think its personal, since his wife was also shot,” he said.
The murder coincided with reports from Saudi Arabia that a German couple escaped unhurt after a Saudi man threw a Molotov cocktail at their car outside a western housing compound in Riyadh on Tuesday.
“On Tuesday night, a man in national (Saudi) dress threw a Molotov cocktail at the car of a German couple outside their compound in a residential area in north Riyadh,” the source said.
“The couple were unhurt, the man escaped and police investigations are ongoing,” he said, calling the incident “very serious and a cause for concern”.
The German embassy advised Germans living in Saudi Arabia to tighten their personal security.
Saudi officials have said it was too early to speculate on whether a bomb blast last Saturday, which killed an American and another foreigner and injured four others in the eastern Saudi city of Khobar, was related to the terror attacks in the United States.
A US official said the blast appeared to be an “isolated incident”.
Al-Qaeda’s prime demand is the departure of thousands of foreign troops from the Muslim region — about 4,500 US military personnel are based in Kuwait. —AFP