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.”

US targets in the Middle East

Recent attacks include:

• November 21, Sidon, Lebanon: American nurse, Bonnie Witheral, shot dead at a Christian mission
• November 21, Kuwait: Two US soldiers shot and seriously wounded by Kuwaiti policeman
• November 20, Saudi Arabia: An armed Saudi man burnt down a McDonalds restaurant close to a US airbase
• October 28, Amman, Jordan: Senior US diplomat Larry Foley assassinated outside his home in the Jordanian capital
• October 8, Failaka Island, Kuwait: US Marine shot dead after two Kuwaitis opened fire on a military exercise. Both suspects were killed when Marines returned fire
• October 6, Ash Shihr, Yemen: A French tanker, The Limberg, was attacked using a small explosives-filled boat
• April 5, Manama, Bahrain: Firebombs thrown at the US Embassy during protests in which 100 people were injured
• March 15, Sanaa, Yemen: Yemeni man threw two grenades at the US Embassy

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