JEDDAH, 24 September 2005 — Saudi Arabia has passed onto the Interpol the names of 18 of its most wanted terror suspects and asked it to trace them, a senior security official said.
Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, official spokesman of the Interior Ministry, said the ministry had published the list of wanted terror suspects outside the Kingdom. “It’s an alert to all countries that these men are wanted by the Saudi government for security reasons and also a notice to the ports of those countries to arrest them upon identification and hand them over to Saudi authorities,” said Al-Turki.
“This is not new. Details of individuals wanted for security reasons are passed onto the Interpol,” he pointed out.
Maj. Gen. Ali Al-Obaishi, a senior Saudi security official said in Berlin that the suspects, many believed to be living outside Saudi Arabia, were notified to Interpol last week.
“We provided about 18 names,” said Obaishi, who heads the Saudi national bureau of Interpol. “We have a big suspicion that most of them are outside Saudi Arabia,” he said, without naming any country.
Interior Minister Prince Naif was quoted by newspapers this month as complaining the Kingdom had not received enough international cooperation in its crackdown on militants.
Saudi Arabia has been battling a two-year wave of attacks by Al-Qaeda militants. Officials say they have broken up militant cells and supply lines inside the country but that more attacks are possible, particularly if Saudis fighting in the Iraqi insurgency bring their battle back home.
A Saudi security source said the Kingdom had been looking for greater help from Syria, Yemen, Iran and Iraq in tracing or arresting the suspects. It had also sought assistance from Mauritania, where one man is believed to have fled. But he said it had had little response from these countries.
Obaishi, speaking at Interpol’s annual conference in Berlin this week, echoed Prince Naif’s frustration over the lack of help, saying some countries were not implementing Interpol “red notices” filed by Saudi Arabia.
Red notices are worldwide requests to arrest suspects with a view to extradition.
“We ask Interpol to work harder to encourage other countries. Some countries don’t take good care of red notices,” Obaishi said. “If we want someone and we know he’s in country A, and that country does nothing, it’s very frustrating for us.”
Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble acknowledged that lack of cooperation in implementing red notices was an issue, but said it was a sovereign decision for each member country whether to make arrests on the basis of the notices.
Most men named on the June list of suspects are Saudis. But the list also includes three Chadian, a Kuwaiti, a Yemeni, a Mauritanian and a Moroccan.
Of the 21 suspected militants believed to be outside the country, one surrendered to the Saudi Embassy in Lebanon and another was extradited by Yemen and five died in gunbattles with security forces.
Four of them were killed in the latest standoff between Al-Qaeda militants and security forces in Dammam. Four security men also died in the three-day operation, which reached its peak with the storming of a terror hide-out in the city’s Al-Hamra district on Sept. 6. Several others on a list of 36 wanted terrorists have been either killed or detained in Iraq.
— Additional input from agencies
