“If you can flee with your skin, then do so. By Allah, they will climb your walls and will come to you from where you do not expect,” Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Abu Baseer Al Wuhayshi says in a video posted online, the US-based monitoring group reported.
Deputy Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, responsible for security affairs, was lightly injured in the August 27 attack in Jeddah that was claimed by AQAP, which named the bomber as Abdullah bin Hassan bin
Taleh Assiri.
“Our heroes have woven their grave-clothes with your blood,” Wuhayshi says.
The video also contains a telephone conversation between Assiri and the prince, in which the bomber says he wishes to return to Saudi Arabia from Yemen because he has repented.
On September 1 the Saudi interior ministry also released excerpts of the same conversation.
Saudi and Yemeni branches of Al Qaeda announced in January their merger into “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula”.
The attempt to kill Prince Mohammed was the first high-profile Al Qaeda attack on the Saudi government since militants rammed a car bomb into the fortified interior ministry in Riyadh in 2004. It was also the first strike on a member of the royal family since Al Qaeda launched a wave of attacks in the kingdom in 2003.
