JEDDAH, 5 May 2004 — Saudi Arabia yesterday vowed to crush the extremists behind a wave of terror attacks in the Kingdom and said it was doing its utmost to protect foreign residents.
The Saudi government “is determined to strike with an iron fist in fighting this deviant group and rooting out” the terrorists, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told a news conference.
His remarks echoed those of Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, hours after four gunmen went on a shooting rampage in the industrial city of Yanbu on Saturday, killing five expatriates and a National Guard officer.
In the wide-ranging press conference, Prince Saud accused exiled dissidents of being associated with pro-Israel groups. “As everyone knows from (Monday’s) Interior Ministry statement, the leader of the latest attack had links with the renegades (Saad) Al-Faqih and (Mohammed) Al-Masari,” he said.
“Although these two renegades have no weight whatsoever, it is known that they have contacts with, and even financing from, sides connected to Israel,” he said.
The Interior Ministry statement said that the chief of the four assailants who carried out Saturday’s shooting spree in Yanbu was Mustafa Abdul Qader Al-Ansari, who was wanted by authorities. It said he left the Kingdom around 10 years ago and joined Faqih and Masari, working “with them in their suspicious committee,” a reference to the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights formed by the two men in 1993.
Prince Saud made the remarks when asked to explain a reference by Prince Abdullah to “Zionist hands” behind terror attacks that have rocked the Kingdom over the past year. “It is no secret that extremist Zionist elements ... are waging a fierce campaign against Saudi Arabia,” leveling “false accusations and fabricated slanders” at the Kingdom, the foreign minister said.
“The desperate attempt by the terrorist group to undermine security, stability and national unity serves the interests of these Zionist elements, which makes the convergence of goals tantamount to evidence of some kind of link” between the Zionists, the terrorists “and the Kingdom’s enemies abroad,” he said. Prince Saud said Saudi Arabia was doing its best to protect foreign residents. “The state is doing all it can to protect all residents, and we hope this will assure every government that to the extent that its citizens are safe in their own country they are also safe here,” he said.
As for fighting terrorism, “I don’t think there is any country doing more than Saudi Arabia is doing ... whether in confronting domestic terrorism or in cooperating against external sources of terror,” the prince said. “There are government reports and international reports that confirm this fact. Hence past slanderous accusations that the Kingdom was not doing enough on this score have all but ceased,” he added.
The United States last week praised Saudi Arabia for making significant strides in combating extremist violence. “Saudi Arabia has launched an aggressive, comprehensive and unprecedented campaign to hunt down terrorists, uncover their plots and cut off their sources of funding,” the State Department counterterrorism coordinator, Cofer Black, wrote in the introduction to the department’s annual “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.
Questioned about an April 15 call by Washington to its citizens to leave Saudi Arabia, Prince Saud said Western governments had to issue such warnings in order not to be accused of negligence in the event of terror attacks. However, he was also critical of the warnings.
“We believe threats should be assessed in conjunction with the host country before a warning because the exchange of security intelligence among two countries or more is the way to protect both (foreign) residents and citizens in this country,” he said.
On the Iraqi situation, Prince Saud said violence in the country could be halted by a full and speedy transfer of sovereignty to Iraqis and the rebuilding of their armed forces.
The minister said Iraq’s armed forces, disbanded last year by the US, must be re-established to “fill the security vacuum” in the country, where US soldiers and Iraqi civilians have been killed in daily attacks.
Civil institutions need to be built up to improve the political, economic and security situation, and the United Nations must be given responsibility in the transition period, he added.
Prince Saud said the reported US abuses of Iraqi prisoners were the result of the continued occupation and called on the US-led occupation forces “to put an end to these practices and call to account those responsible”.
Prince Saud said Palestinians alone had the right to determine their fate and called on the United Nations to send international troops to protect Palestinians.
The rejection by Israel’s ruling Likud party of Ariel Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza showed the Jewish state was only interested in grabbing more Palestinian land rather than peace.
He voiced hope that the peacemaking quartet — the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations — would “take back the reigns of the initiative, propose constructive ideas to revive the peace process under the road map and force Israel to meet its pledges under the initiative”.
Prince Saud also expressed his hope that Saudi Arabia will join the World Trade Organization before the end of this year. “The American side has reduced some of its demands during WTO talks with the Saudi team. This makes us feel optimistic,” he added.
