In an audiotape played on Al Arabiya, a Qaeda regional commander threatened “major operations” against the kingdom following the arrest of Haylah Al Qassir. Qassir was believed to be responsible for recruiting women to the global militant group as well as handling money issues, the Arab satellite television channel said.
“Al Qaeda is organising cells to kidnap…princes, ministers and officials including military commanders,” Saeed Al Shehri said in the audiotape.
He said that “preacher” Heila Al Qsayer, a widow of a Saudi Al Qaeda militant killed six years ago by the Saudi authorities, was arrested in Qassim, north of the capital, but did not specify when.
“We tell our soldiers: You have to kidnap in order to release the prisoners,” he said. Shihri, who is purportedly number two in the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted that families of prisoners held in Saudi Arabia should take arms to secure their release instead of grovelling to officials. “Stop knocking at the doors of the tyrants and their deviant ulemas,” he said.
“If you want your relatives to be released from prison, they will only be out by the same way they were taken in,” he said.
The regional Yemen-based arm of the group, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), jumped to the forefront of Western and Saudi security concerns after it claimed responsibility for a failed December attempt to bomb a US-bound passenger plane.
In April, the group tried to assassinate the British ambassador to Yemen when a suicide bomber threw himself into the path of his convoy in the capital, Sana’a. Only the suicide bomber died, but the bold hit signalled that a recent crackdown by the Yemeni government on the global militant group has done little to curb its ambitions to carry out attacks in the region and beyond.
Last August, a 23-year-old AQAP suicide bomber posing as a repentant militant, tried to kill Prince Mohammed bin Nayef who heads Saudi Arabia’s anti-terrorism campaign. Yemen, struggling to curb a northern Shia insurgency and a southern separatist movement, has faced international pressure to quell domestic conflicts in order to focus on fighting a resurgent Al Qaeda in the impoverished country.
