Suicide Is Painful

‘YESTERDAY’S bombing of compounds for foreign workers in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, has sent the papers into overdrive.

Murder most foul

The front-page agenda was set at 11:25, the time the Independent says that two vehicles laden with Muslim fanatics and 400lb of plastic explosives rammed a residential building.

The result of that attack and the onslaught it triggered is that at least 29 people are dead and 194 injured.

Of the already murdered, nine were attackers from Al-Qaeda, suggesting that Saudi Arabia and not Hungary now has the most suicide-prone youth in the world.

If you think that’s a glib comment given the horrific attack, it is in keeping with the Guardian’s lead column in which readers hear how ‘international terrorism, not bogeyman dictators, remains the urgent security threat’.

It depends, of course, who is under immediate threat. And while many Saudis will have died at the behest of their countryman, the dead or alive Osama bin Laden, the Times leads with the work of one so-called bogeyman: Saddam Hussein.

On the Times’ cover, a woman sits amid piles of human bones, parts of the remains of 3,000 people discovered in mass graves at the site of ancient Babylon.

The Guardian does include this macabre story (the Independent has it on page 2) but only on page 16, a million words away from yesterday’s sensational attack.

But, then, a bomb is so much more exhilarating than a tale of the extinction of 3,000 people away from the public gaze.

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Posted: 14th, May 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink