Saudis hold hundreds in security operation

Caryle Murphy, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: June 25. 2008 10:03PM UAE / June 25. 2008 6:03PM GMT

RIYADH // Saudi police have arrested more than 700 people in the past six months for alleged attempts to revive and finance networks linked to al Qa’eda, including some that were plotting attacks on oil and security facilities, Saudi officials said today.

Of those arrested, 181 were released for lack of evidence, but 520 persons, including both Saudi nationals and foreigners, remain in custody, an official statement said. Disclosure of the arrests followed comments by the interior minister, Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, that security forces had found evidence of terrorist financing.

“We have found things … that can be used as evidence against al Qa’eda’s financial backers,” Prince Naif recently told Asharq al Awsat, adding that he hoped to release the findings of an investigation soon.

Gen Mansour al Turki, an interior ministry spokesman, said the arrests were made in different parts of the country and that some of those detained had been “recruiting Muslims from outside Saudi Arabia” to join terrorist cells here.

“They are serving the al Qa’eda ideology and it has been proved that they have been in contact with foreign organisations,” he said. “These people were planning to re-establish al Qa’eda in Saudi Arabia. They have been trying to publicise al Qa’eda ideology, collect money for terrorists, and trying to recruit Saudis to get involved” in terrorist activities inside the kingdom.

The arrests led some long-time observers to speculate that many of the detainees are not operatives who would carry out operations but sympathisers willing to support and finance militant networks.

Gen Turki said one of the disrupted cells included people who had been collecting money for suspicious activities in 2003 and 2004, but for one reason or another had not been arrested at that time. “They are doing the same thing now,” he said, and as a result were detained.

Gen Turki declined to say which countries the detainees are from, but if the past is anything to go by they are likely to be from Egypt, Sudan, Yemen and Indonesia.

Police checkpoints on the roads in Riyadh were noticeably more frequent in recent nights.

Gen Turki said the arrested suspects came from “more than one group” and that some of the organisers were “taking advantage of the hajj” to recruit militants.

The official statement, carried by the government-run Saudi Press Agency, said officials “have carried out a number of security operations against the deviant groups who have been working for the service of the country’s enemies targeting the country’s principles, security, economy and way of life”.

“Deviant” is a term Saudi officials use to describe the ideology of al Qa’eda and similar groups.

Those arrested “have been working through planning and recruitment to revive the criminal activities in all regions of the kingdom so as to make the internal security situation in the kingdom similar to the security case in the unstable regions, because these deviant groups cannot work in the stable societies”. This was clear, the statement said, from “several documents” confiscated with the militants, which included “research which they called ‘management of savageness’”.

Police also confiscated “money, weapons and ammunition”, some of which was “buried in remote areas”, the statement said.

The suspects included some who were financing terrorist activities “by all means even through theft and misleading”, it said. “They resorted to direct contacts with … individuals … to obtain money under the guise of charity work.”

Members of “a media cell” were arrested. They are believed to have recruited militants on the internet, partly by “stimulating emotions [through] images of suffering Muslims”. In the eastern part of the country, police broke up a cell “controlled by a number of residents from an African country who do not work in the jobs they came for. Their main purpose was to approach workers in the field of oil in an attempt to find work inside the oil installations.”

Others of those arrested had planned a car bomb attack on an oil installation, the statement said. One of the arrested militants had a message from Ayman al Zawahri, al Qa’eda’s top strategist. The message said Zawahri would “provide persons … from Iraq, Afghanistan and north Africa to target oil installations and fight security forces”, the Associated Press reported.

Terrorist networks inspired by al Qa’eda rocked the kingdom with several attacks on residential compounds that killed scores of civilians in 2003. In Feb 2006, security forces thwarted an alleged al Qa’eda attack against Saudi Arabia’s massive Abqaiq oil-processing facility. And April last year, security forces announced the arrest of 380 militants.

cmurphy@thenational.ae