On the night of June 25, 1996, a tanker truck loaded with explosives was parked against the perimeter fence of the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and detonated. The blast sheared the entire face off Building 131, an eight-storey dormitory housing airmen of the U.S. Air Force’s 4404th Wing (Provisional), who were enforcing the no-fly zone over southern Iraq.
Nineteen U.S. airmen were killed and nearly 500 people were injured, 372 of them Americans. A U.S. security policeman, Alfredo Guerrero, spotted the truck and its fleeing occupants and ran through the building knocking on doors; the evacuation he started was still under way when the bomb exploded, and it is credited with saving many lives.
The U.S. investigation attributed the attack to Saudi Hezbollah (Hezbollah al-Hejaz), acting with Iranian support. On June 21, 2001, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, indicted fourteen men — thirteen Saudis and one Lebanese national — on murder and conspiracy charges. None has stood trial in the United States. Ahmed al-Mughassil, accused of heading the group’s military wing, was detained in Beirut in 2015 and transferred to Saudi custody; he remains on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists. In a separate civil case in 2006, a U.S. federal judge held Iran liable for the bombing and awarded the victims’ families $254 million.