So after the shoot up in Hawalli the baddies are still at large. The Arab Times newspaper had the following write-up if you missed it:
Officers, gunman killed after US warns Westerners of drive-by shooting
threat
KUWAIT CITY: Two policemen and a wanted suspect they were chasing were
killed Monday in a shootout in a suburb of the capital, the Interior Ministry
and state media said. The suspect, Fawwaz Tlaiq Al-Otaibi, was injured in the
shooting and died of his wounds in the hospital, state television reported.
Al-Otaibi allegedly shot at police chasing him after he entered a shop in the
Hawally suburb of the capital. He was wounded but escaped into a waiting car
with a number of his "colleagues" in it, according to an Interior Ministry
statement quoted by the television station. "One of the suspects in the car"
shot at police as it left the scene killing the two policemen and injuring two
others, it said. Within an hour, the Kuwait News Agency announced that Al-Otaibi
had been arrested. Later the television said he had died. The reports did not
specify what the men were wanted for, nor if any others had been arrested along
with Al-Otaibi. Unconfirmed reports, however, quoted securitymen as saying a
second suspect had been arrested and was in Mubarak Al-Kabir Hospital after
being wounded. Interior Minister Sheikh Nawwaf Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah told state
television he had visited the injured policemen, who were in stable condition at
the hospital. He said Al-Otaibi had entered a car rental shop to return a
vehicle when police attempted to capture him. The minister said Al-Otaibi and
his friends in the car used pistols to shoot at police. "While fleeing, one of
the persons in the vehicle fired at the policemen killing Lieutenant Hamad
Mohammed Al-Ayyobi and Sergeant Ayman Al-Rushoud. Sergeant Bader Al-Methen was
shot in the abdomen while Sergeant Fahd Al-Samhan was shot in the elbow," a
security source told the Arab Times. He also said suspect Al-Otaibi was shot in
the head in the exchange of fire. "All the suspects are known to us and we know
they had fought in Afghanistan and Iraq," the source said. "They are extremists
and we will arrest them within hours." Meanwhile, a medical source at the
Casualty Room in Mubarak Hospital, Hawally, where all the injured were rushed,
said, "we received three persons with gun shot wounds around 7:00pm." "We tried
to resuscitate Al-Otaibi, who was shot in the head, at the ICU. But our attempts
failed and he died," he added."A bullet had penetrated Sergeant Bader
Al-Methane's abdomen from the right side and gone out from the other side. We
operated on him immediately and he is in a stable condition at the ICU," the
source continued. He went on to say, "Sergeant Fahd Al-Samhan, who was shot in
the elbow, was operated on and later rushed to Al-Razi Hospital for further
treatment." Authorities have been cracking down on Islamic militants opposed to
the presence of US forces in Kuwait. The Hawalli incident happened a day after
Kuwait lifted a high security alert imposed two weeks ago. Under the measures,
security personnel in armoured vehicles fanned out in key areas, especially
around vital oil installations and Western embassies.
In another article in the paper, the well-respected reformist Sheikh Saud Nasser Al-Sabah, an ex-Minister of Information (before being ousted by an Islamist campaign for allowing controversial and banned books to be sold at a local book fair) and ex-Minister of Oil had the following to say:
Describing the security situation in the country as "fire under ash," Sheikh
Saud said, "sleeper cells are still present in Kuwait. Sadly some of them
are in
the military and security forces. We have been warning of this danger
for many
years and we expect more sleeper cells will be uncovered in the
future."
He's also been qouted in international media recently as well, referring to how Kuwait is being hijacked by Islamist groups - see this and this.
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