British cyclist was deliberately run down in Saudi Arabia

by Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter Published: 6:30PM GMT twenty-seven February 2010

John Currie, who worked for BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace), is believed to have been one 4 cyclists who were being "cut up" by internal youths in dual cars on a main highway on the hinterland of Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

Initially, it is accepted that one of the cars clipped a cyclist, causing him to tumble off his bike. Then, however, one of the drivers is purported to have incited around and on purpose ploughed his car in to the cyclists.

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Mr Currie, 54, a human resources workman with BAE, is pronounced to have been crushed opposite the vehicle"s windscreen and after died from his critical injuries. His widow, Pauline, is returning to Britain this weekend.

The couple, from Chester, Cheshire, are believed to have dual grown-up children. Mr Currie"s physique will be flown home for a wake service.

In the past fifteen years, there have been a array of militant attacks on British and alternative horse opera nationals in Saudi Arabia by Muslim extremists. Several westerners have been killed - and even some-more harmed - in a array of bombs and gun attacks. Radicals are indignant that US and British oil companies and their staff are handling on Saudi soil.

In one incident, Simon Cumbers, 36, an Irish freelance cameraman, was shot passed and Frank Gardner, the BBC"s security correspondent, was critically harmed by strong al-Qaeda sympathisers as they filmed in Riyadh in 2004.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) reliable the death, that occurred on Thursday. "A British national, John Currie, died in a highway trade collision on February twenty-five and we were informed. We have offering consular benefit to the family." Sources at the FCO pronounced it would be for the Saudi authorities to establish if there was a "guilty party" concerned in the incident.

BAE has additionally reliable Mr Currie"s death. The association employs 4,500 staff in Saudi Arabia, together with around 2,000 Britons.

A association orator said: "We can endorse that John Currie was a BAE Systems worker who worked for the HR group in Saudi Arabia and was concerned in a highway collision last week.

"Our thoughts and feelings are with his family and friends. The Saudi authorities are right away questioning the box and it would be inapt for BAE Systems to criticism any further."

Company sources contend the actuality there is an detain does not indispensably meant there will be rapist charges. "Under Sharia law - the Muslim law - the motorist is arrested even if it is an accident," pronounced one source. "Under Sharia law too, he might have to compensate a sure volume [to the family of the victim] depending on whose error it was."