KUWAIT CITY -- An American contractor working for the U.S. Army was killed and another was wounded Tuesday when gunmen fired on them on a highway south of Camp Doha, the main U.S. military base in Kuwait.
No group claimed responsibility and no arrests have been made. U.S. Ambassador Richard Jones condemned the shooting as a "terrorist incident."
The attack occurred about 9:15 a.m. local time at a stoplight near the Doha Spur, about five miles south of the camp, as the Americans waited to turn off the main highway onto a road leading into Kuwait City.
Kuwaiti police said one gunman, possibly two, opened fire near a small wooded area with an AK-47 rifle, pumping at least 24 rounds into the passenger's side of the Toyota sport utility vehicle in which the men were riding. The passenger was killed instantly. The driver sustained multiple gunshot wounds and was taken to two local hospitals for treatment. Doctors said he was in stable condition after five hours of surgery.
U.S. Embassy officials identified the man who died as 46-year-old Michael Rene Pouliot, 46, of San Diego. He worked for Tapestry Solutions, a San Diego-based software development firm under contract to the Army.
Officials withheld the identity of the wounded man, pending notification of next-of-kin.
Milen Kokersnic, the supervising surgeon at al Razi hospital, where the wounded man underwent surgery, said he had been shot once in the chest and three times in the right thigh and had superficial wounds to the right side of his torso.
Kuwaiti police cordoned off the area where the shooting occurred, and U.S. military investigators and local authorities spent several hours combing it for clues. Police set up checkpoints around Kuwait City to search for the assailants, whose identities and motives were unknown.
The attack came as U.S. and allied military forces build up in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf for a possible strike against Iraq, which the Bush administration accuses of possessing chemical and biological weapons in defiance of U.N. edicts to disarm. There are some 17,000 U.S. troops and some 8,000 American civilians in Kuwait.
It was the third time that U.S. troops and personnel have come under fire in Kuwait since October. Two gunmen, who professed ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network, fired on a group of Marines on Failaka Island, off the coast of Kuwait, during a training exercise in October. They killed one Marine and wounded another. The Marines shot and killed the attackers, who were Kuwaitis.
In November, two U.S. soldiers, who were dressed in civilian clothes, were shot as they traveled along a highway in Kuwait City. Both survived. The suspect, an off-duty Kuwaiti police officer, was later captured in Saudi Arabia and is in jail in Kuwait, awaiting trial.
Generally, Kuwaiti citizens and foreign residents express good will toward the United States for liberating Kuwait from a seven-month Iraqi occupation during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Yet people in Kuwait and throughout the Muslim world resent what they see as American bias in favor of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and they tend to believe that the war on terrorism really is a war against Islam.
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