It later reported that among those injured included three Americans and three Canadians of Arab origin. Witnesses at the site saw four residential buildings destroyed, with an area of about 50 square meters (60 square yards) reduced completely to rubble, and buildings heavily damaged for hundreds of meters (yards) beyond that, with windows shattered, doors blown off and furniture thrown out of place. Officials at the King Khaled Specialist Hospital and the King Faisal Special Hospital & Research Center said both hospitals received 38 wounded people. In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Amanda Batt said one American was wounded and another was unaccounted for. Some Saudis also live there, plus a few German, French and Italian families.
Diplomats and officials on Saturday said most residents in the compound, which is located in a valley, were Lebanese. Embassy in Riyadh said it continued to receive information that terrorists were planning future operations and urged Americans to be "particularly vigilant" during the holy Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. Embassy issued a warning that terror attacks could be imminent in the tense Gulf kingdom, which has been cracking down on homegrown militants since the May 12 bombing in Riyadh that killed 35 people, including the nine attackers. America's three diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia were closed Saturday as a result and will stay closed Sunday On Oct 25, the U.S. Early today, Al-Arabiya TV, quoting unnamed Saudi sources, said five people were killed. It also reported the discovery of an unspecified number of bodies belonging to attackers involved in the blast.
Lebanon's Al Hayat-LBC satellite channel, quoting Saudi security sources, also said five people were killed, including a child. In comments published Sunday on the Web site of Saudi daily Okaz newspaper, Interior Minister Prince Nayef said they could not rule out a connection to terrorist cells targeted in recent sweeps, as a number of suspects from those cells were still at large The attack occurred a day after the U.S. An Interior Ministry official said on condition of anonymity that the compound attack was by a suicide car bomber and similar in style to a series of car bombings in the Saudi capital on 12 May that were blamed on the al-Qa'ida terror network and that killed 35 people, including nine suicide bombers He said he did not know how many took part in the attack. Some witnesses said the car bombers used what appeared to be a police car. The Interior Ministry official said 86 people were wounded, most of them children and women; and two security guards from India and Sudan were killed. Immediately after the explosion, there were widely conflicting reports of the death toll. A Riyadh hospital official said dozens were killed, but he later said only "a number" of people died without specifying a figure.
