Summary According to police, the assailant was wounded and subsequently arrested.
RIYADH (AFP) - A gunman shot dead one American and wounded another at a petrol station in the Saudi capital on Tuesday, in a rare attack on Westerners in the kingdom, police said.
Following the attack near King Fahd sports stadium, a shootout ensued between the gunman and the security forces, a police spokesman said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.
The assailant was wounded and subsequently arrested, police said, without identifying him.
"The wounded were taken to hospital," SPA added.
The Saudi Gazette, in a Tweet, cited Interior Ministry spokesman General Mansur al-Turki as describing the suspect as a US-born Saudi.
A US embassy spokesman could not be immediately reached.
Tuesday s shooting was the first deadly attack on Westerners in Saudi Arabia since several were killed in a wave of Al-Qaeda violence between 2003 and 2006.
It comes as Saudi Arabia participates in a US-led campaign of air strikes against jihadists of the Islamic State group (IS) in Iraq and Syria.
But there was no immediate indication of any links between the attack and the more than three-week campaign.
Saudi pilots who participated in the initial late-September strikes against IS received online death threats.
In January, a Saudi court sentenced to death an Al-Qaeda militant and jailed 10 others over a May 2004 attack that killed six Westerners and a policeman.
The defendants, seven of whom are brothers, were convicted of aiding assailants who attacked a US company in the northwestern port town of Yanbu, killing two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Canadian, as well as a Saudi.
Saudi authorities have long feared blowback from jihadist groups, particularly after the attacks of a decade ago, which included assaults on housing compounds where foreigners lived and led to a crackdown.
Security around Western facilities has been markedly increased since then.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers who took part in the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States were from Saudi Arabia.
The ultra-conservative Wahhabi Islamic tradition is predominant in Saudi Arabia, where it applies to both religious and political life.
But authorities have expressed concern about extremist ideas tempting Saudi youth, some of whom have joined fighters in Syria, where the IS has declared a "caliphate" straddling Syria and Iraq.
The group has been accused of committing a spate of atrocities including crucifixions and beheadings.
Saudi Arabia s top cleric, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, in August urged Muslim youth not to be influenced by "calls for jihad ... on perverted principles," and described Al-Qaeda and IS jihadists as "enemy number one" of Islam.
During the annual hajj Muslim pilgrimage in western Saudi Arabia this month he said Muslim leaders must strike the enemies of Islam with "an iron hand".
"These criminals carry out rapes, bloodshed and looting," he said, adding that "these vile crimes can be considered terrorism" and their perpetrators have nothing to do with Islam.
