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dmb · Joined: 12 Feb 2003 Posts: 8397

I heard from a friend today who works at Marconi( in Riyad). He said that today at work there was some army security guy giving them a lecture and informed the staff that they are likely targets(because of who they worked for).
Does this happen often? I remember during the Gulf war (in qatar we were given those sort of things and what to do if ..... However I always felt pretty safe during the war. It was probably one of the safest places with Camp Snoopy on the doorstep. Is security that bad or is it a case of scaremongering?

Saudi4Ever · Joined: 25 Mar 2004 Posts: 135

i dunnu know but i think its pretty obvious who the targets are, so why the army suit to explain it. they would be better off having mandatory fire drills in the schools, as another fire in a makkah girls school was reported injuring 22 girls. a stampede! i remember how great our schools fire drills were. knowing how the saudis have no idea of what a line is, i can imagine the chaos of a fire.

who can i talk to, to promote this?

scot47 · Joined: 10 Jan 2003 Posts: 15343

Crown Prince Abdullah.

You could also try to talk to the local office of the Commision for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (colloquially the "Mutawaeen")

Stephen Jones · Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 4124

When I first taught it Riyadh the classrooms were so small that on occasion the students had to walk over the others desks to get to the front.

At one parent-teachers meeting one of the parents asked me why his son's schoolwork always had another student's footprints on it and so I explained.

He asked me what the procedure would be in case of a fire.

I explained that I always made sure that I had a clear line to the door, and that if a fire started I would walk out of the building with the register and wait in the car park across the road to see if any of the children made it out alive. No Lord Jim syndrome for me!

To go back to the original topic, when some of us came back from the summer holiday we found that they had built a compound around us and we now have ten foot high concrete walls and half the police in Eastern Province at the Gate.

A few weeks ago the secruity expert for the American multi-national whose staff are housed with us gave us all a briefer meeting. When he mentioned how his colleagues had been killed by the IRA we tactfully declined to call out "Yea, but they got you out in the end didn't they", and we even managed to keep quiet when we found that our evacutaion plans in case of a terrorist attack included assembling at Megacorps "mess-hall", but it did become abundantly clear that the whole plan had been lifted from a David Niven movie when we got to the last bullet point on the Powerpoiin slide "Loose lips sink ships".

Well at least he wasn't giving the presentation in Riyadh!