700 militants arrested this year, Saudis say

Saudi Arabia has arrested 700 militants in the past six months on suspicion of planning attacks on the country’s oil industry and other targets, the interior ministry said yesterday.

The figure suggests the Saudi security forces still face a significant threat from al-Qaida despite the perception, at least in the west, that the organisation has been effectively beaten, or has at least peaked, in the country of Osama bin Laden’s birth. General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, said in an interview last month that al-Qaida had suffered “near strategic defeat” in Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
Saudi security forces carried out several operations and arrested 701 people of various nationalities, said the ministry spokesman, General Mansour al-Turki. Of those, 520 – divided into five cells – were still being held for involvement in the organisational and ideological plans of the “deviant ideology” – the Saudi official term for al-Qaida. The others were released for lack of evidence.

The televised statement said that those arrested had planned to revive “criminal activities” and that their leaders were based abroad. The detainees included some of Asian and African nationality. Some had planned to use car bombs to attack an oil installation and a security target in coordination with Bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who would send fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa to support them.

Guardian