AFP

Riyadh

Saudi Arabia said yesterday it has dismantled an emerging Al Qaeda-linked group tied to extremist organisations in Yemen and Syria, arresting scores of alleged militants.

Authorities have arrested 62 suspected members, including a Palestinian, a Yemeni and a Pakistani, the interior ministry said, adding that authorities were still searching for 44 others whose names had been submitted to Interpol.

The ministry statement said the group was “plotting criminal operations targeting government installations, foreign interests, assassinations against security personnel, religious figures and government officials”.

Saudi authorities launched a massive crackdown on Al Qaeda following a spate of deadly attacks in the kingdom from 2003-2006, prompting many militants to flee to neighbouring Yemen, where they established Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), now considered one of the global network’s most formidable affiliates.

Security services found “elements of the deviant organisation in Yemen (AQAP) to have contacted their counterparts from deviant groups in Syria and co-ordinated with deviant elements in the kingdom, where they chose an emir,” or leader, Gen Mansur al-Turki, a ministry spokesman, told reporters in Riyadh.

When asked to specify the group in Syria he was referring to, Turki said it was the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a group fighting in Syria and Iraq.

A partnership between AQAP and ISIL would be surprising, as the latter is currently battling Al-Nusra Front, the official Syrian branch of Al Qaeda, and has rebuffed repeated demands by Al Qaeda’s overall leader Ayman al-Zawahiri to confine its activities to Iraq.

But Turki also said the kingdom did not distinguish between the two groups fighting in Syria, saying they followed the “same deviant ideology”.

Turki said the emir of the new group was among those arrested, without naming him, and said the arrests were made over a period of two months. He also said several women were detained.

Turki said “suspicious activities on social networks” had facilitated the arrests, adding that funds worth $240,000 were seized, with most of the money having been raised online.

He said the new group was smuggling arms via the porous border with Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is building a 3m high fence along its southern frontier.

The ministry said those arrested include 35 Saudis who had previously been detained on security-related allegations and released.

The government has banned several militant outfits, including both ISIL and Al-Nusra Front, in recent months.

Riyadh has said it will prosecute anyone who backs blacklisted extremist groups “financially or morally”, or who seeks to promote them in the media and on social networks.

It also forbids “participation in, calling for, or incitement to fighting in conflict zones in other countries”.

Yemen’s army has meanwhile been carrying out a major offensive against AQAP in the country’s rugged southern and central provinces. Page 15