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Saudi diplomat shot dead in Bangladesh: police

06 March 2012 21:33 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-aPAÅŸ A Saudi Arabian diplomat was shot in the chest and killed in an upmarket district of the Bangladeshi capital on Tuesday while taking a late-night walk near his home, APA reports quoting AFP.

Officers found badly injured 45-year-old Khalaf al-Ali at an intersection just two buildings away from his residence in the city’s Gulshan area, Dhaka police deputy commissioner Lutful Kabir said.

Ali, the head of Saudi citizen affairs at the embassy, was rushed to a local hospital after the shooting at 1.20 am, but died three hours later.

"He was hit by a bullet in the left chest," Kabir said.

The Bangladeshi foreign ministry expressed its "deep shock and sorrow" at the murder and said an investigation had begun "in order to find out the details and bring the perpetrators of this heinous crime to justice."

The scene of the shooting was cordoned off by police on Tuesday and security was stepped up in the diplomatic area of the city.

Another senior policeman, Nizamul Hoque, told AFP the diplomat had been living alone in a rented apartment in Gulshan for several years.

"He has been a regular late-night walker. Sometimes he would walk up to 2:00 am in the night. He was wearing a jogging outfit and trainers at the time of the incident," he said, adding that the bullet had struck his heart.

Hoque said a security guard at a house saw a man fleeing in a car immediately after the gunshot. "He could not tell whether any other person was in the car," he told AFP.

Saudi ambassador Abdullah Bin Naser al-Busairi told private news agency UNB: "We hope the government will catch the killers.

The Saudi foreign ministry confirmed the attack urging Bangladeshi authorities "to rapidly improve the protection" of all at the Saudi embassy, according to a statement carried by the official Saudi SPA news agency.

Saudi Arabia is a key ally of and a major donor to Bangladesh, but ties have become strained in recent years after Riyadh tightened recruitment from the South Asian country.

More than two million Bangladeshis -- a quarter of the impoverished nation’s large migrant population -- work in the ultra-conservative Muslim kingdom.

There was also outrage last October when eight Bangladeshis were beheaded in the Saudi capital after being convicted for robbery and murder.