RIYADH, Nov 26, (Agencies): Saudi Arabia has arrested 149 suspected al-Qaeda-linked militants in 19 separate cells planning attacks on state officials, foreigners and journalists, the interior ministry said on Friday.
The arrests, which took place over the past eight months, involved both Saudi and foreign nationals with links to al-Qaeda operations mainly in Yemen, but also in Afghanistan and Somalia, ministry spokesman General Mansur al-Turki told reporters.
“The largest majority of them (the cells) were created by AQAP,” Turki said, referring to al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group led by both Yemenis and Saudis.
“Some had links to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (and) some actually had links to al-Qaeda in Somalia,” including training with the Somalia branch, he added.
Turki gave few details about the cells’ activities. “Most of the plots were against individuals,” he said.
Their targets were mainly Saudi security and political officials, journalists and resident “non-Muslim foreigners” or “westerners”, he said, without being more specific.
He could not say if they had planned to attack key economic installations such as oil storage facilities and pipelines or refineries, which Saudi-based al-Qaeda operatives had tried to bomb five years ago.
One cell was apparently training people in the use of electronic bombs, possibly car bombs, while another was raising money for al-Qaeda abroad, Turki said.
And one group was planning to seize weapons from a government security department.
It was another sign that the radical Islamist organisation led by Osama bin Laden was continually seeking to undertake attacks inside Saudi Arabia which gave birth to the group, according to Turki.
In March, Saudi authorities announced that they had arrested 113 people linked to al-Qaeda, 101 of them in one single network.
In August 2009, AQAP narrowly failed when it attempted to kill the assistant interior minister for security, Mohammed bin Nayef, using a suicide bomber.
“This is a continuous effort by al-Qaeda. al-Qaeda will never give up,” Turki said.
Of the 149 arrested, 25 were foreigners identified only as being Arab, African and Asian in origin.
One was a woman, a Saudi, who was arrested for posting al-Qaeda materials on the Internet under multiple pseudonyms, Turki said.
Most of the people in the 19 cells had links to AQAP, which has increasingly been behind international bombing attempts, including the parcel bombs intercepted en route to the United States in October.
“They sent some (people) here; in most cases AQAP recruited them from inside Saudi Arabia,” he said.
The group often used the cover of hajj and umrah pilgrimages to Makkah to send envoys and make contacts, he said.
Dozens of computers, troves of documents and weapons that would have been used in attacks were also seized in the arrests, Turki said.
Authorities also recovered the sum of 2.24 million riyals (about $600,000) from the cells that was to be used to support al-Qaeda both inside and outside Saudi Arabia.
Turki said that the kingdom has contacted Interpol for the arrest of others allegedly linked to the plans.
Analysts said that while the announcement was not unusual for Saudi Arabia, it pointed to the kingdom’s continuing struggle against militancy but also its improved intelligence and tactics in fighting al-Qaeda.
“There is no doubt that there is a security problem. Particularly it seems (to be) coming from inside Yemen,” said Neil Partrick, an independent Britain-based analyst on the Middle East.
“In the last five years the Saudi security services ... have become more efficient at intercepting security threats, whether those directed against soft targets or those against major installations.”
A Saudi Arabian counter-terrorism drive halted a violent al-Qaeda campaign in the Gulf Arab country from 2003 to 2006. al-Qaeda’s Yemeni and Saudi wings merged in 2009 into a new group, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen.
“The organisation is trying to recruit people inside the kingdom. There are cells that facilitate (the recruits) to travel outside (the kingdom) to train and then they return, Turki said.
“They exploit the Haj season for this purpose,” Turki told journalists at the press conference. The plan was to send them to countries including Somalia and Yemen, he said.