The most horrific attack took place in May, when 22 people were slaughtered in the gated community of Khobar Towers, some of who had their throats cut.Yesterday’s shooting was the second killing of an Irish national in two months. An Irish civil engineer was killed in his office in Riyadh yesterday by attackers who stormed in with machine-guns.
The brazen attack appeared to demonstrate that Islamic militants bent on driving foreigners from the kingdom are still able to operate at will, despite efforts by the Saudi government to stop the violence. He adds: “Now I have the freedom of giving my opinion as a presenter and to encourage the listeners to give theirs.”. More seriously, he says: “You couldn’t mention the word Kuwait Or Iran.

How has life changed? Well, he says with a smile, for one thing you couldn’t mention, let alone play the music of, Iraq’s most popular singer, Kazem al-Saher, after he failed to turn up to a birtday party of Uday Hussein. The audience seem to go for it; a telephone poll on on the Baquba bombing last week adduced 80 per cent opposition with special emphasis on the unacceptability of killing innocent Iraqis.As it happens, Majid Salim is himself an ex-Saddam-era radio broadcaster. Karim Yusef, the man Rikably he appointed as his deputy, says the station has five principles which are the only constraints on otherwise complete freedom of speech: no encouragement to kill; no other incitements to violence, no libellous accusations against anyone who cannot defend themselves; no encouragement of ethnic hatred and no swear words. Two of the network’s board members are close lieutenants of Iyad Allawi, the US-backed interim Prime Minister, including his former head of security, Ibrahim al-Janabi, who has issued at least one alarming warning in recent weeks of wider media censorship.Whatever the future of the Iraqi Media Network, Radio Dijla, the station Rikaby energetically put together after he quit, is flourishing within the severe constraints of a deeply unstable Iraq – attested by the 24-hour guard of AK-47-brandishing security men outside the studio. And there were arguments with US officials over whether the station should be providing propaganda or objective news, as Rikaby wanted. In August, Rikaby resigned, saying that without adequate funding or staffing, the network was failing in its “duty to present objective news – the truth”.Rikaby still insists he believes that the Bush administration wanted – and still wants – a free broadcasting network and that prospects for Iraqi state radio and television under a new consortium, which includes the Harris Organisation, have improved.Current omens, however, are, to say the least, mixed.

So much so that Rikaby found himself pretty well fomenting a strike by Iraqi staff whom SAIC were paying a mere $60 (£33) a month compared to the $600 to $1000 a day the Western media consultants were earning.There were suspicions about several hundred million dollars which had been destined for transmission equipment which was unaccounted for. There were constant rows over money with Science Applications International Corporation, a company wholly without media experience but which the US administration hired to manage the network. He started crying.”But it wasn’t the journalists who were the problem. The scriptwriter came back some time later trembling with fear and begged him not to be angry “The guy had changed the word ‘trash’ to ‘garbage’. I told him if I hadn’t trusted him I wouldn’t have asked him to rewrite it, that he was free now.