Saudi security forces shot dead one of the country's top Al Qaeda leaders in the holy city of Medina yesterday, adding to a toll of the group's successive chiefs gunned down in shootouts.
The clash that killed Saleh al-Ufi coincided with another operation in the north of the capital Riyadh and was the first of its kind since Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz assumed the throne of the oil-rich kingdom this month.
It came days after Western governments warned that fresh terror attacks may be imminent in Saudi Arabia, where suspected Al Qaeda militants launched a spate of bombings and shootings in May 2003, many targeting Westerners.
An interior ministry statement carried by state media said Ufi was one of two members of the "deviant group" - official terminology for Al Qaeda - killed when security forces returned fire as they tracked presumed extremists in Medina.
A third militant was wounded in the shootout and arrested, said the ministry, which identified Ufi as "wanted by security authorities." An expatriate, whose nationality was not specified, was seriously wounded and a security man slightly hurt in the gunbattle, it said.
Security forces had earlier arrested nine suspects at other locations in Medina in the west of the kingdom, the ministry said. Ufi, one of the kingdom's top suspected militants, was one of two men from a wanted list of 26 still at large. The other, Taleb al-Taleb, remains in hiding.
Ufi was reported to have replaced Abdul Aziz al-Muqrin, the notorious chief of "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," who was shot dead in a gunbattle in Riyadh in June 2004, shortly after his group posted gruesome pictures on the Internet of a beheaded American engineer they had abducted.
The beheading of Paul Johnson was the climax of a series of attacks against Western residents of the kingdom. Ufi was later reported to have been succeeded by Saud al-Otaibi, one of 15 militants killed during a three-day gunbattle with security forces in Al-Qassim, north of Riyadh, in April.
Moroccan-born Yunis Mohammed Ibrahim al-Hayari, who succeeded Otaibi, was also shot dead during a battle with security forces in the capital on July 3. The interior ministry reported another incident in Riyadh yesterday in which human remains were found resulting from an explosion after security forces tracked down a suspect and besieged a residential location.
"Security forces pursued a member of this gang (of Al Qaeda suspects) who had infiltrated into Riyadh in disguise and ended up in a residential location north of the city," the ministry said.
The twin operations, which began at dawn and lasted several hours, followed a spate of warnings from Western embassies about possible terror attacks.
© 7Days 2005
