[2] On 8 November, a bomb was detonated outside the Al-Mohaya housing compound west of Riyadh, killing at least 17 people and wounding 122, mostly Arab foreigners.
[5] A smaller campaign of insurgency in Saudi Arabia had begun in November 2000 when car bombings were carried out targeting and killing individual expatriates in Riyadh and other cities.
The Saudi government also warned of this and issued an alert for 19 men believed to be members of Al-Qaeda planning attacks.
Around 11:15 pm, multiple gunmen infiltrated the Al Hamra Oasis Village, a site inhabited mainly by Westerners.
According to one American military official quoted by the Daily Telegraph, it took the bombers (...) 30 seconds to a minute to get from the gate to the housing block.
They then drove at breakneck speed with a bomb weighing nearly 200 kilograms to the most intensely populated location in the complex and blew it up.
The intelligence officials believe that al-Qaeda has infiltrated even the elite National Guard, which is involved in compound security.
[8] The attacks were denounced by then-US President George W. Bush as "ruthless murder"[9] and by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah as the work of "monsters."
[15] However, according to an interrogation of former al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, al-Adel and Saad were being held prisoner in Iran when the attacks took place.
[20] On 8 November, a suicide truck bomb detonated outside the Al-Mohaya housing compound in Laban Valley, West of Riyadh, killing at least 17 people and wounding 122, among them 36 children.
Bradley reports that in an alternative version of the bombing—provided to him by Saudi opposition figures with sources among disgruntled members of the security forces and government—the police car was "in fact ... a car belonging to the Saudi special security forces,"[25] and that the bomb was not detonated in suicide but by remote control, its detonators escaping unharmed.
Thus, attackers dressed as policemen, driving a special security forces car, taking care not to kill any of those defending the compound, and apparently not themselves being fired upon with any degree of accuracy [meant that] There could not be greater evidence, if even only half of that proved true, that Al-Qaeda had infiltrated Saudi Arabia's military and security forces, including those entrusted with the protection of residential compounds.