The three Americans killed or kidnapped by Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia in the past week were probably selected as targets days or weeks in advance and singled out because of their work as military contractors, United States and Saudi officials said.

Authorities continued to search for the kidnapped American Paul Johnson, 55, an employee of Lockheed Martin, whose family reported on Saturday that he had vanished in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

A group calling itself al-Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula issued a statement that day saying it had captured Mr Johnson and would treat him in the same way that US troops had treated Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The phone number on Mr Johnson's business card indicated that he worked at the Riyadh headquarters of Advanced Electronics, a Saudi technology firm that manages a number of military contracts for the Saudi Government.

Advanced Electronics also employed Kenneth Scroggs, another American, who was gunned down by three assailants as he pulled into the garage of his home in Riyadh on Saturday afternoon, Saudi officials said.

A third American, Robert Jacobs, 62, was fatally shot in his home in Riyadh last Tuesday after leaving the Riyadh office of Vinnell Corporation, where he worked on a project to train the Saudi National Guard.

Seven Vinnell personnel were killed in May 2003 in a suicide bombing of a residential compound for Westerners in Riyadh.

The US embassy in Riyadh released a statement saying last week's attacks on Americans "appear to have involved extensive planning and preparation and were likely preceded by extensive pre-attack surveillance".

On Sunday the embassy warned Americans in the kingdom to pay close attention to their surroundings and to avoid predictable workday routines that could make them easy targets.

As the British Foreign Office on Sunday gave all non-essential staff and their families in Saudi Arabia permission to return home, British Airways said its flight crews would no longer spend nights in the country because the airline feared for their safety. The airline will land in Kuwait instead, then make short-haul trips to Riyadh.

The al-Qaeda-affiliated group, in its statement on Saturday, said Mr Johnson was one of four experts in Saudi Arabia on the Apache attack helicopters used by the US military elsewhere in the Middle East. The statement indicated that Mr Scroggs had also advised the Saudi Government on the use of Apaches.

Advanced Electronics was awarded a five-year, $US10 million US Army contract in 1999 for repair work on Apache systems.

The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said on network television on Sunday that he was satisfied with the Saudi Government's efforts to investigate the recent attacks and to prevent future bloodshed.

The Washington Post, The Guardian

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