RIYADH, June 7: BBC correspondent Frank Gardner lay in a coma on Monday after extremists riddled him with bullets and killed the accompanying freelance Irish cameraman, Simon Cumbers, as they were filming in a slum area here.

The shooting on Sunday evening occurred as Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal renewed a vow to defeat extremists waging a war to chase Westerners from Saudi Arabia. Mr Gardner, a 42-year-old Briton, was "in a coma and very critical," one doctor said, adding that bleeding had stopped and "he has improved in the last six hours".

The incident occurred on a street outside the home of Ibrahim Al Rayyes, an extremist killed in clashes with Saudi security forces in December 2003, located in a slum area of Riyadh known to be a hotbed for hardliners.

Mr Gardner, BBC's security correspondent and an Al Qaeda expert, was left for dead by the fleeing attackers, local newspapers said. But he survived and pleaded for his life, shouting to bystanders to help a fellow Muslim, a police officer told AFP.

"I'm a Muslim, help me, I'm a Muslim, help me," the father of two daughters cried in Arabic, the officer said. Mr Gardner, fluent in Arabic, was carrying a small copy of the Quran, a device used by Western reporters to try to reassure extremists.

The BBC team were accompanied by a "minder" and a driver from the Saudi information ministry who escaped unhurt, a police officer said. Both men were now under investigation, the officer added.

"The criminal acts will not weaken the determination of the kingdom to fight this lost minority who are isolated religiously, socially and intellectually," he said. "These lost people are now, with cowardly attacks, striking blindly against easy targets," the minister said at about the same time as the BBC team came under fire.

He did not directly mention the shooting, but vowed that security forces would hunt down the "terrorists" to "eradicate them". British Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed outrage at the attack.

"I think it is important we recognise that day in, day out, this is a strategy by terrorists who will kill innocent people, who will kill people who are involved in our democracy," he said.

"They are a threat in literally every part of the world," Blair said. "We have to be vigilant and get out and get after them and make sure we deal with this issue." The Saudi foreign minister gave credence to reports that the Al Khobar gunmen were allowed to escape.

Security forces, Prince Saud said, had been right to give priority to saving the captives' lives. "These criminals had no inhibition against taking lives," he said, adding that security forces were on their trail and would capture them. -AFP