Murders at Mecca

King Ibn Saud, a man who has been credited with the strength of 40 men, and actually has 40 sons, is protected by an efficient police force. In pilgrim-packed Mecca last week they suddenly arrested on charges of plotting regicide one of the most notorious wastrels in the Near East. He was besotted Sherif Abdul Hamid, whose peccadilloes caused him to be cast off by his family. In Arabia, where the Sherif is considered a mental case, none was surprised when the King's police presently announced, after grilling six and killing one of the followers of Abdul Hamid, that he had merely dreamed up a fantastic scheme of regicide after losing a lawsuit over some land in which the King was interested.

To Mecca the arrest was just a local scandal, but to London it smacked at first of important Nazi machinations in the Middle East. Wastrel Abdul Hamid did visit Germany last year. Asserted Lord Beaverbrook's London Daily Express: "The conspiracy to murder King Ibn Saud was hatched not in the sultry courtyards of Mecca but in the chill, tile-floored galleries of the Wilhelmstrasse. . . . Germany's object was to start a guerrilla war behind Britain's back in Palestine and Egypt." Next day the Daily Express was curtly corrected by a Saudi Arabian official statement in London: "The man [Sherif Abdul Hamid] had no political party behind him. In fact, there was no attempt on the King's life at all because he lives at Riyadh while the would-be assassin never got beyond Mecca." Nevertheless, Abdul Hamid was jailed for life.

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