Saudi Arabia Says Broke Up Al-Qaeda Cell Planning Strike

Saudi Arabia said its security forces arrested dozens of al-Qaeda-linked militants who were planning to carry out attacks on government and foreign targets in the country.

More than 60 people, almost all Saudi nationals, were arrested, Major General Mansour Al Turki, a senior Interior Ministry official, told reporters in Riyadh yesterday. He said the group was planning to assassinate security officials and had built a bomb-making facility.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest crude exporter, has cracked down on al-Qaeda since 2004, when an attack on an oil installation killed 22 foreign workers. Critics of the kingdom say it has been partly responsible for the rise of militant groups in the region because it has financed some of them, including in the Syrian civil war.

The cell uncovered by Saudi authorities is linked to al-Qaeda groups in Yemen and Syria, and had smuggled weapons across the Yemeni border, Al Turki said. Saudi security discovered the group by monitoring their activity on social networking websites, the ministry said in a statement on the Saudi Press Agency.

“This perhaps shows a linkage between Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Islamic fighters in Syria,” Theodore Karasik, director of research at the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis in Dubai, said by phone. “We have been concerned that there would be two al-Qaeda linked groups together on both sides of the kingdom, with what appears to be plans to attack targets in Saudi Arabia.”
Fleeing Crackdown

Yemen-based militants have hit Saudi Arabia in the past. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, now the Saudi interior minister, was wounded in August 2009 when a suicide bomber blew himself up at the prince’s office in Jeddah, an attack that al-Qaeda said was planned in Yemen.

Yemen is a haven for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which includes Saudi militants who fled the government crackdown starting in 2004. It’s been used as a base to plan attacks against the U.S., including an attempt to parcel-bomb American synagogues.

“Yemen is a failed state,” said Paul Sullivan, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University in Washington. “It is getting worse by the day. The Saudis should get increasingly worried about what might come out of Yemen.”

Saudi Arabia, with a Sunni Muslim majority, has taken steps to prevent its citizens from going to fight in the civil war in Syria. The conflict pits mainly Sunni rebels against President Bashar al-Assad, whose government has roots in a version of Shiite Islam.
Afghan Blowback

Saudi Arabia said in February it will jail its citizens fighting abroad for between three to 20 years.

Islamists returned to Saudi Arabia from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with skills they later turned against the Al Saud family and its control of the world’s second-largest crude reserves. The kingdom last month sentenced three people to death after they were convicted of taking part in the 2003 bombing of three residential compounds in the capital Riyadh.

The kingdom in March designated al-Qaeda groups in the region as well as the al-Nusra front in Syria as terrorist organizations.

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