Two wounded after attack at Armistice day service in Saudi Arabia
Two people have been wounded following an attack at an Armistice Day commemoration ceremony at a cemetery in the Saudi Arabian city of Jiddah .
French, American, British, Italian and Greek officials were commemorating the end of World War I at the event on Wednesday when an improvised explosive was detonated.
“Such attacks on innocent people are shameful and entirely without justification,” said a joint statement issued by the embassies of the five countries.
The group also acknowledged the work of Saudi first responders at the scene.
Hours after the attack, Saudi state-media quoted a local official acknowledging the attack and saying that a Greek consulate employee and Saudi security man were lightly wounded in the incident. The Saudi official said an investigation is underway.
Saudi state television also broadcast from outside the cemetery and stressed that the security situation was now “stable.”
The attack follows a stabbing on October 29 that wounded a guard at the French Consulate in the same city. The stabbing was carried out by a Saudi man, who was arrested but his motives remain unclear.
French official Nadia Chaaya told the French network BFM that she was at the cemetery when she heard an explosion as the consul general was near the end of his speech.
“At that moment we didn’t really understand, but we felt that we were the target because directly we saw the smoke and we were of course in panic mode,” she said.
“We tried to understand, and we were most of all afraid to see if there was going to be a second wave.”
She said the group scattered in different directions into the street.
Jiddah, the Red Sea port city, saw its Ottoman troops surrender to the local troops backed by the British in 1916 amid the war. That sparked the start of the Kingdom of Hejaz, which later became part of Saudi Arabia in 1932.
France has urged its citizens in the kingdom to be "on maximum alert" amid heightened tensions after an assailant decapitated a French middle school teacher who showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
France's Emmanuel Macron has voiced continued support for caricatures as a cornerstone of free speech - riling some Muslims who view the depictions as incitement and a form of hate speech.
The country has suffered two deadly Islamic extremist attacks in the past month.
Three people were killed in a church in the southern city of Nice, and a teacher was beheaded outside Paris for showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to his class for a debate on free expression.