RIYADH, 6 February 2004 — Security forces staged a six-hour siege of a mosque in Riyadh yesterday after a wanted militant took refuge there following a car chase in the city. The incident occurred at the Suhail ibn Saad mosque in the King Faisal Quarter in the east of the capital.
According to eyewitnesses, the siege started at 10 p.m. on Wednesday evening after a GMC saloon car carrying two suspected militants was forced to stop at a makeshift checkpoint. One of the two was then arrested by security men but the other ran off into the nearby mosque.
When residents of the area were contacted by the press, it was still not clear whether the suspect had been taken into custody. They said that security forces had withdrawn at dawn.
There were also conflicting sources as to whether there had been an exchange of gunfire between the suspects and the government forces, it is reported.
Meanwhile authorities here believe they have found the body of a wanted militant who is thought to have been injured in clashes with police but had managed to escape.
It is reported that forensic teams are conducting DNA tests to confirm that the body is that of Amer Mohsen Al-Zaydan Al-Shihri, a Saudi national and No. 23 on a list of 26 top suspects wanted in connection with “terrorist” operations in the Kingdom. The list was published in December. Since then one militant has been killed and another has surrendered.
Shihri’s father, Mohsen Shihri, told Okaz daily that his son had at one time worked with the Kingdom’s religious police but then had gone to Afghanistan eight months before the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
“He told me he went to Afghanistan for jihad and training to face the enemy,” the newspaper quoted the father as saying, adding that his son had returned home after the US-led war in Afghanistan. He had then been detained for two months.
Last week seven men were arrested and large amounts of arms and explosives seized in a raid in Riyadh on the home of another suspected militant, Hamoud Juwayer Al-Feraj.
Six security officers were killed in the raid, along with the suspect’s father who had tipped off the police and led them to the house. The authorities allowed the mother of the suspect to visit him in Al-Hair prison on the day of Eid Al-Adha.
