Saudis Kill 4 Al Qaeda Militants

Muqrin's group later released a video on the Internet of a blindfolded Johnson, threatening to kill him unless the Saudi government released an unspecified number of militants from prison. Saudi officials disclosed few details about how they tracked down Muqrin. At first, authorities in Riyadh said a witness had seen a car dump Johnson's body and took down the license plate number, but Jubeir and other officials later said that was not the case.

Jubeir said 15,000 Saudi security forces had swept through Riyadh block by block in their search for Johnson and his killers. Late Friday, security forces setting up a roadblock trapped Muqrin and three other militants in a car, although Jubeir said he didn't know if the confrontation occurred by happenstance or because of specific intelligence of Muqrin's whereabouts.

The gunfight lasted about two hours, Jubeir said. "The terrorists tried to shoot their way out," he added. Saudi television showed broken glass, bloodstains and other evidence of the shootout at a gas station in central Riyadh.

Al Qaeda acknowledged the death of Muqrin on the Internet, after an earlier claim that he was alive and well.

Jubeir described one of the other dead militants, Faisal Dakheel, as the "number two al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia."

Also killed were Turki Muteiri, one of three gunmen wanted for the May 29 attack in Khobar; and Ibrahim Dreihim, suspected of planning the suicide bombing at the Western compound in Riyadh last November, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.

The dozen militants who were arrested elsewhere during the sweeps in Riyadh included Rakan Saikhan, one of the Saudi government's 26 most-wanted terrorism suspects and an alleged conspirator in the attack on the Cole, a Saudi security source said. The Interior Ministry said police also confiscated large caches of weapons, including three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, computers and $30,000 in cash.

"This is a monumental blow to the cohesive operational structure of Muqrin's operation," Nawaf Obaid, a security consultant to the Saudi government, said in a telephone interview from London.

The State Department has been urging Americans to leave Saudi Arabia since April, and the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh issued an even stronger warning late Thursday, saying that Americans were being shadowed by militants.

On Saturday, U.S. Ambassador James C. Oberwetter said the security situation had improved but that the country remained a dangerous place.

"It will be some time before we achieve a comfort level that the situation returns to normal," Oberwetter said at a news conference in Riyadh. "The Saudis are doing an excellent job working on their most-wanted list and taking people off that list. . . . But not everyone has been removed from the list. Maybe there are more."