RIYADH: Senior Al-Qaeda operative Fahd Al-Ruwaili, whose name figures on the list of the Kingdom’s 85 most wanted militants, has turned himself in to authorities in Riyadh, according to the spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
“Al-Ruwaili, said to be a prominent Al-Qaeda leader, has returned to Saudi Arabia voluntarily and turned himself in,” Mansour Al-Turki, the ministry spokesman, said here yesterday.
He said Al-Ruwaili returned to the Kingdom some time this week from Syria, where he is suspected to have helped facilitate the movement of young Gulf nationals into Iraq and Afghanistan to fight.
“Al-Ruwaili had been detained and further action will be taken under the law,” said Al-Turki. “The detention is part of an ongoing exercise under which security agencies had been detaining and interrogating suspects, who were found planning attacks or involved in terror acts.”
Al-Ruwaili is believed to have been working in Al-Qaeda training camps along Syria’s border with Iraq for the past several months, according to international media reports.
The reports say that Al-Ruwaili provided these young men with weapons and forged travel documents to help them enter Iraq from Syria.
For years, tons of explosives and a long line of foreign terrorists have streamed across the Syrian border into the Iraqi provinces of Anbar and Nineveh, said the report.
In addition to Al-Ruwaili’s detention, six suspected Al-Qaeda militants have also been captured in Yemen on charges of “plotting attacks against oil facilities, foreign targets and tourists,” according to a statement from Yemen’s Interior Ministry. It was not clear whether any of the suspects are Saudi or whether they feature on the Kingdom’s list of 85 most wanted suspects. Arab News tried to contact the Yemeni Embassy yesterday, but could not speak to any diplomat because of the weekend.
The ministry statement said that Yemeni security forces arrested six suspects, who have been held responsible for carrying out two recent attacks against South Koreans.
They are also suspected of plotting 10 other attacks. Other accomplices of the suspects were still being hunted, according to the statement.
