US nurse shot dead in
Lebanon
Brian Whitaker in Cairo and agencies
Friday November 22, 2002
The Guardian
A woman was shot dead and two soldiers were seriously wounded in two separate attacks on
Americans in the Middle East yesterday. Bonnie Weatherall, a 31-year-old nurse, was found
dead at a Christian evangelical centre in Lebanon where she worked. A security source said
she had been shot at least three times in the head. A colleague, speaking anonymously to
Reuters, said the church, which runs a school and health clinic in Sidon, had been warned
to leave the area by "Sunni Muslim extremists". "About three to four months
ago the frequency of the warnings increased and the language toughened," the worker
said. Some of the Muslim clerics in Sidon have accused the church of trying to convert
young people to Christianity. About 30% of Lebanon's population is Christian. Several
militant Sunni groups are active in Sidon and Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp
nearby. They include Usbat al-Ansar, which is alleged to have connections with al-Qaida
and is on the US list of proscribed organisations. Since May there have been at least five
bomb attacks on American fast-food restaurants in Lebanon. Two American soldiers were
seriously wounded when a policeman opened fire on them in Kuwait yesterday while they were
travelling on official business between the military base of Camp Doha and the town of
Oraifijan, 35 miles south of Kuwait City, a US military spokesman said. One soldier was
shot in the face and the other in the shoulder. The condition of both men was described as
serious but not life-threatening. The motive was unclear, but a Kuwaiti official suggested
that the police officer had a history of mental health problems. He reportedly escaped
across the border to Saudi Arabia after the shooting. This is the latest in a series of
incidents involving American troops in what could become the launch pad for a US-led
invasion of Iraq. Last month, two gunmen, believed to be militant Islamists, shot dead a
US marine and wounded another on the Kuwaiti island of Failaka. The attackers - whose
exploits were later praised in a tape recording attributed to Osama bin Laden - were
killed by other marines.
Spate of attacks raises Arab terrorism fears
AMERICANS came under attack across the Middle East
yesterday, prompting fears of a new wave of terrorist strikes at vulnerable Western
targets in the Arab world. An American nurse was killed by a gunman in Lebanon. Two US
soldiers were shot and injured in Kuwait by a fugitive policeman. In Saudi Arabia a gunman
burst into a McDonald’s restaurant and set it alight. US officials are investigating
whether the incidents were isolated attacks or part of a coordinated campaign. Hours
before the latest violence, the US State Department had issued a warning to American
citizens abroad that Osama bin Laden was preparing fresh attacks against them. Last week
he appeared to claim credit for a wave of recent terrorist strikes from the bombing in
Bali to an attack at sea on a French tanker off the coast of Yemen. Whether orchestrated
or not, the impact of the latest violence will be much the same: to sow fear among
American and other Western expatriates living in the region. The deadliest attack was in
the southern Lebanese city of Sidon, where Bonnie Witheral, 31, anassistant nurse married
to Gary Witheral from Crawley in West Sussex, was found lying in a pool of blood at the
clinic where she worked. She had been shot three times in the head. She worked for the
Christian Missionary Alliance, which runs a school and a health clinic and serves mainly
Palestinians from the nearby Ain el-Hilweh refugee camp. According to local reports, the
church had received a series of threats by extremists warning it to close its mission and
leave. Mrs Witheral’s murder is the first attack on an American citizen in Lebanon
since a spate of kidnappings and killings of Westerners during the civil war, which ended
a decade ago.
Various militant Palestinian and Lebanese Sunni Muslim groups are active in the area and
one is linked to the al-Qaeda network. Earlier this week Vincent Battle, the US Ambassador
to Beirut, cancelled a visit to the city after protests from religious leaders. A second
manhunt started in Kuwait after two American soldiers were shot and injured by a traffic
policeman on a motorway south of the capital. Kuwaiti sources said that the soldiers,
based at the sprawling US military Camp Doha, were in civilian clothes and travelling in
an unmarked car when they were flagged down by the Kuwaiti officer near the town of
Oraifijan. One was shot in the face and the other in the shoulder before the policemen
fled across the border into Saudi Arabia. US officials, mindful of the dangers posed to
Western troops as they mass in Kuwait and other Gulf states in preparation for an invasion
of Iraq, played down the incident. “There have been terrorist attacks in that region
for my entire adult lifetime, and that is a long time,” Donald Rumsfeld, 70, the US
Defence Secretary, said. The Pentagon now has about 50,000 troops in the area. Although
they are usually confined to their bases in the Gulf or kept out of sight on board ships,
the larger the force becomes the more vulnerable it will be to terrorist attacks from
local groups. Saudi Arabia, where support for bin Laden is thought to be strongest, said
that it would crack down on violence after an arson attack against a McDonald’s near
the Prince Sultan airbase, where 4,500 US troops are stationed. A gunman walked into the
restaurant on Wednesday and doused the building with petrol before setting it alight.
“We will fight this act with all our power and bring it under control,” Prince
Nayef, the Interior Minister, said. “Punishment will be severe.
Lebanese police
hunt killer of American missionary
(Reuters) - Lebanese security forces on Friday hunted a gunman who
killed an American missionary after her church had been warned by Muslim clerics not to
try to convert Muslims to Christianity. A day after the
shooting of Bonnie Witherall, a nurse assistant at an evangelical maternity clinic, her
British husband said his wife had known the risks of coming to Sidon, a mostly Muslim port
in south Lebanon. "Some people said don't go because
it's too dangerous, but both of us made the decision together. We were ready to lay our
lives down," Gary Witherall told Reuters. "We
both knew the threats. We were diligent and careful. I even bought Bonnie a cellphone for
emergencies," he added. Church workers said no
specific threats were ever made against the church, but that rumours had been spread
alleging the clinic offered abortions and was trying to convert Muslims. "We had a discussion with Muslim clergy in Sidon... They don't
want anyone to be converted to Christianity," said Sami Dagher, head of the Christian
and Missionary Alliance churches in Lebanon. "They
asked me to stop any Muslim coming to the church and I told them I cannot do that. It is
the house of God and anyone is allowed to come," he added, saying the centre would
remain open. There was no immediate claim of
responsibility but a number of radical Sunni Muslim groups are active in southern Lebanon,
including one on Washington's list of terrorist organisations with suspected links to
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. A leading Sunni
cleric in south Lebanon said he did not condemn Witherall's killing but urged Lebanese to
use other methods to show their contempt for U.S. policy. "We
do not condemn, but we want a different method than this one to show that our whole
society is against the American policy," Sheikh Maher Hammoud said.
"Actions of killing and bombings that target Americans in
any place... are an expression of Muslim condemnation of U.S. policy," he added,
saying he had repeatedly warned the Christian mission not to try to convert Muslims.
The incident was the first such killing in Lebanon since the
1975-1990 civil war, when Lebanese Muslim fundamentalist groups kidnapped and killed
Americans and other Westerners. The spelling of
Witherall's name as given by her husband differs from previous spellings issued by
colleagues and the U.S. embassy.
THREE SHOTS
A suspected Islamist militant shot 31-year-old Witherall, born
in California but raised in Washington state, three times in the head on Thursday as she
entered her clinic in Sidon. "The first shot was in
her mouth as if to silence her. It appears when she fell on the floor she was shot twice
in the head," a source close to the investigation said. The U.S. embassy in Beirut warned Americans in Lebanon to "remain
vigilant" after the killing, saying it was working with Lebanese authorities on the
case. Lebanese police and security officials questioned
witnesses and suspects on Friday but said no one had been arrested. Anti-American sentiment has grown in Lebanon since a Palestinian
uprising against U.S. ally Israel began two years ago. Anger has also intensified over
Washington's threatened military action against Iraq. Last
month, a senior U.S. diplomat was shot dead in Jordan amid a similar anti-American mood.
Gary Witherall said he forgave his wife's killers. "It's a very expensive forgiveness. It's not cheap,"
Witherall said. "I forgive them, but there are tears in my eyes." He said he
would take her body home next week. A memorial service was planned for Sunday in Sidon.
Friends Remember
Slain Missionary
(AP) _ An
American missionary killed in southern Lebanon considered the Middle Eastern nation her
home and was excited about working with women at a clinic there, said friends in the
Northwest. Bonnie D. Penner, 31, died when a gunman fired three bullets into her head
Thursday at the Unity Center, which houses a Christian chapel and the clinic where Penner
worked as a nurse, providing medical care and help to local people and Palestinian
refugees. "She chartered her course early in life to go out and be of service. I look
at her as a junior Mother Teresa," Portland, Ore., Police Chief Mark Kroeker, a
family friend, told KGW-TV. "She's just the kind of person who doesn't walk out of
your life without leaving a massive hole," said the Rev. Bill Perkins, also of
Portland. Perkins, whose son is a friend of Penner's husband, Garry Whitherall, said his
family had become very close to the couple in recent years. "We feel like we've lost
a daughter," Perkins said in a telephone interview Thursday. In an e-mail Penner sent
Perkins on Monday, she wrote:
"I felt this overwhelming joy in being here in this place. I have such a heart for
the women in this camp and I can touch their lives through the clinic." Investigators
believe a gunman knocked at the door of the clinic and shot Penner when she opened the
door. A colleague found her body, police said. The shooting is believed to be the first
targeted killing of a U.S. citizen in Lebanon in more than a decade. During the 1980s,
more than 270 Americans were killed in shootings and bombings in the country, which shares
borders with Syria and Israel. Perkins said Penner and her husband never expressed any
fears about traveling to the Middle East, where resentment of Americans has been growing
in the face of a possible war in Iraq.
"They went because they wanted to go where they felt the need was the greatest,"
Perkins said. "They felt safe in Lebanon." Penner's parents, Al and Ann Penner
of rural Lynden, about 100 miles north of Seattle, were not commenting on their daughter's
death, said a friend who answered their telephone. School records in Vancouver, Wash.,
show Penner attended Walnut Grove Elementary School and graduated from Fort Vancouver High
School in June 1990. She met Whitherall while attending Moody Bible College in Chicago
from 1993 to 1996. She earned a degree in international ministries from the school by
correspondence in 2000. She and her husband were married in 1997 in Lake Oswego, Ore.,
said Perkins, who performed the ceremony. Before leaving the United States in 2000, the
couple worked at First Consumers National Bank in Beaverton, Ore. Penner's supervisor at
the bank, Jeanette Miller, said the couple were enthusiastic about working in Lebanon
despite the dangers for Americans there. "She was excited about being there. She
wanted to go over and do God's work," Miller told The Columbian newspaper of
Vancouver. "She enjoyed what she was doing. She loved Lebanon, and felt that was her
home.
Lebanese Prime
Minister Condemns Killing of US Missionary
VOA News:
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has condemned the Thursday killing of an American
missionary as a horrible crime aimed at undermining Lebanon's security and stability. Mr.
Hariri says "nothing can justify" the shooting of Bonnie Penner, the first
killing of an American in Lebanon in more than 10 years. Authorities say an unidentified
man shot Ms. Penner at the clinic where she worked as a nurse in the southern Lebanese
city of Sidon. The California native was married to a British man and had lived in the
area for two years. The clinic is run by Christian missionaries and helps Palestinian
refugees and Lebanese living in the mostly Muslim city. U.S. embassy officials are in
Sidon assisting Lebanese police in their investigation. The port city of Sidon is known as
a center for Muslim fundamentalist and terrorist groups, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and
Lebanese radicals opposed to U.S. support of Israel. Ms. Penner's murder is the latest in
a string of anti-American attacks in Lebanon and across the Middle East. Last week, three
fast-food restaurants associated with the United States were bombed in Lebanon, causing
damage but no casualties. In Jordan last month, an American government aid worker was shot
dead in front of his home in the capital.
Christian Charity Shuts Down
After Nurse's Murder in Sidon
Naharnet: Christian missionaries suspended their philanthropic work in Sidon on Friday,
after the mysterious murder of a young American nurse in the predominantly Muslim city
raised fears from spiraling anti-U.S. sentiment in Lebanon. Investigators were still
searching for clues to the killing of Bonnie Weatherall, who was shot dead Thursday at the
Unity Center, which housed an Evangelical church and a clinic catering to low-income
Lebanese and Palestinian families. A notice posted at the entrance of the building said
that the U.S.-based Christian Missionary Alliance Church "regrets the suspension of
its work" in Sidon. The curt notice did not say for how long the closure would last.
But a senior spokesman for the center told Naharnet that this was a temporary measure and
insisted: "We are not afraid of terrorists." The remark indicated that he
suspected political and religious motives behind the killing of Wearherall, a Californian,
who was found lying in a pool of blood at the center with three bullet wounds to her head.
The U.S. Embassy issued a warning to all Americans to "remain vigilant with regard to
their personal security and to exercise caution." Sources in Sidon said the center
had received and ignored several warnings in the past expressing dismay at its missionary
operations among the Muslims. Prime Minister Hariri, perplexed by the murder in his own
hometown on the eve of the Paris-2 conference of the international donor community,
deplored the attack. "This crime is aimed at harming Lebanon's efforts to strengthen
stability and confidence in the country," he said in a statement from Paris on
Thursday. Hariri has been in the French capital since Tuesday preparing for Saturday's
conference, which will be dedicated for Lebanon's economy and in which the United States
is participating. The nurse, whose maiden name is Penner, had been living with her British
husband Gary Weatherall in Sidon for 18 months. She was the first American citizen to be
killed in Lebanon since the end of the civil war, which saw many political assassinations
and kidnappings of Westerners. Her husband said that he forgave those behind her wife's
death.
Anti-U.S. sentiment has been rife in Lebanon following the backlash against Muslims and
Arabs in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror spree. Small bombs have exploded
outside three U.S. fast-food joints in the country recently, claiming material damage, but
no casualties.
(This report was compiled by the Lebanese Coordinating Council Media Committee -LCCC)