Saudi Arabia: TV shows 4 recalling online route to terror

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RIYADH - Four former militant supporters confessed on Saudi state television on Tuesday night how they organized the Internet operations of Al-Qaeda's campaign against the Saudi government.

They were identified as Abu Azzam Al-Ansari, Abu Omar, Abu Akram and Umm Osama.

Their confessions point to the danger posed to some 8 million Saudis who are Internet users, according to industry statistics. The number of jihadist websites has sharply risen from just 12 in 1998 to at least 5,000 today.

Abu Azzam and Umm Osama both Egyptian explained how they set up the online magazines Sada Al-Jihad and Al-Khansaa promoting jihadist thought and carrying news of the militant campaign. Ansari was arrested last year, Asharq A-Awsat newspaper said on Wednesday, but Sada Al-Jihad has continued publishing. It was not clear when Umm Osama was arrested.

From their statements it appeared that they were brainwashed online into acting for Al-Qaeda.

"I was looking for true news," Abu Azzam said, "because America is covering up its losses in Iraq and there is no truth to the news which it publicizes. He said he began browsing since "access to the Internet is open to anyone."

"Therefore, I started looking for news of the Mujahedin, Afghanistan and Iraq and visited the sites with news and chat rooms."

He admitted that he was one of those who became influenced by the internet. "I believe that many of those who access it are influenced by the jihadist sites," he said, "particularly since the media does not publish books or magazines" about such radical thoughts.

"On the Internet, all people are ordinary characters and one doesn't know whether the other is an ordinary person or a member of a terrorist group," Abu Azzam said. "All we know about each other is that we are both promoters of jihad."

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" began a campaign to destabilise the Saudi government in 2003 with two suicide bomb attacks on foreign housing compounds in Riyadh. The violence was brought to an end by Saudi security forces in cooperation with foreign experts in a counter-insurgency campaign that won plaudits in the West. The last major attack was a failed attempt to storm the world's largest oil processing plant at Abqaiq in February 2006.

Abu Omar said that at the outset,he had logged on to the Internet" to watch the jihad animations and to read statements by Osama Bin Laden and Abdulaziz Al-Megren."

"To be honest," he added, "I started to be influenced by them."

Umm Osama said she started to log on to the extremist websites at home. "The world of forums is a vast, open and new world," she said. "I came across things I was not familiar with before and I was introduced to many enthusiastic people but I later found them to be ordinary characters."

Saudi authorities have detained hundreds of suspects over the past year, many of who are accused of promoting "Takfiri" ideology that deems some Muslims as infidels based on what they see as violations of the Shariah, or Islamic law.

The Interior Ministry said last week it was holding 520 suspects, arrested since January, who planned to stage car bomb attacks against oil and security installations and who had used the Internet to win support and collect money.

Internet monitoring has become a key part of the government's campaign against militant groups and the TV confessions appeared to be part of ongoing efforts to keep Saudis away from militant ideology.

Abu Akram, the youngest of the three said he was enthusiastic about visiting jihadist websites and eventually got hooked. He said there were "too many" such sites online that he could not recall which site led him to Al-Qaeda.

© The Saudi Gazette 2008