Execution deadline looms for US hostage in Saudi

The exact timing of the deadline is not clear, but it is likely to be around midnight in Saudi Arabia, which is 10pm tonight UK time.

Mr Johnson appeared with eyes bandaged and taped, and with a sleeve torn away to show a distinctive tattoo on his shoulder.

He identified himself in a few faltering words, before the video cut to a masked figure identified as Abdulaziz Issa Abdul-Mohsin al-Moqrin, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, who issued the ultimatum.

The Saudi Government has refused to free the militants.

Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, said uncompromisingly that the kingdom would strike soon against al-Qaeda.

America too has refused to negotiate with the hostage-takers.

Instead, more than 15,000 members of the Saudi security services have mounted a search of fundamentalist strongholds in Riyadh in an attempt to locate the kidnappers.

Helicopters have been flying over the districts of Suweidi, Dhahar al-Budaih and Badr, and by last night police had entered 1,200 homes in house-to-house searches.

Even staff at Riyadh fire stations have been ordered to use their local knowledge to help track the captors.

The FBI has sent a team of 20 specialists in hostage rescue, hostage negotiations and profiling to work with the Saudi authorities.

A senior Saudi official in the US said that the search teams had few promising leads.

He added that al-Moqrin was also the chief suspect in the recent shootings of a German and another American in the kingdom.

Several senior Saudi clerics today also appealed to the militants to release Mr Johnson unharmed.

In an emotional televised sermon at Mecca’s Grand Mosque, Sheikh Saleh bin Abdullah al-Humaid denounced hostage-taking and murder as grave sins under Islam.

“Whoever kills any person under our protection will not go to heaven,” said al-Humaid.

The preacher at Riyadh’s leading mosque, the Imam Sultana, pleaded with the “youth of the nation who have trodden the wrong path” to “come back to the fold of the community of Islam,” in a column in today’s Al-Riyadh newspaper.

A Saudi colleague and friend of Mr Johnson’s has written an open letter to the kidnappers, under the pseudonym Saad al-Mu’men, saying that he had offered the hostage the traditional concept of “ijara” - security and protection - and that to kill him now would be in defiance of Muslim teachings.

Mr Johnson is the first Westerner to be taken hostage by al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, although the tactic is regularly used by militants in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He had worked in Saudi for ten years for the US defence contractor Lockheed Martin, specialising in the Apache helicopter. Relatives said that he was due to retire within a month.

Friends, family and former colleagues around the world have held candlelit vigils to pray for his safe release.

At Eagleswood in New Jersey, where Mr Johnson grew up, well-wishers sang ‘Amazing Grace’ and ‘God Bless America’, as they held candles and small flags.

His son, also called Paul, pleaded yesterday on NBC television in the US: “Bring my father home for Father’s Day. The Saudis owe it to him to bring him home alive.”

Relatives of Mrs Johnson have flown home to a remote village in northern Thailand to await word of his fate together.

“He was going to come back here in one month after retiring,” said Saengduan Mainwaring, a cousin who lives in England.

“To see him sitting there is upsetting me so much. On Saturday we, the family, will light candles for him to pray for him to return home safely.”