Al-Qaida: Saudia Arabia Arrests 700 'militants' in Six Months

Saudi Arabia has arrested 700 suspected militants in the past six months on suspicion of planning attacks on the country's oil industry and other targets, the interior ministry announced today.

The figure suggests the Saudi security forces still face a significant threat from al-Qaida despite the perception, at least in the west, that the organization has been effectively beaten, or at least peaked, in Osama bin Laden's homeland.

General Michael Hayden, the director of the CIA, said in an interview last month that al-Qaida had suffered "near strategic defeat" in both Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Security forces carried out several operations and arrested 701 people of various nationalities, said the ministry spokesman, General Mansour al-Turki. Of those, 520 were still being held for involvement in the organizational and ideological plans of the "deviant ideology" ? the official Saudi term for al-Qaida. The others were released because of lack of evidence.

The televised statement said those arrested had planned to revive "criminal activities", and that their leaders were based abroad. The detainees included some of Asian and African nationality. Some had planned to use car bombs in attacks on an oil and a security target in coordination with Bin Laden's Egyptian deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who planned to send fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa to support them.

It said that the leader of an al-Qaida cell in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province was found with a taped message from Zawahri, thought to be in hiding in Pakistan's remote tribal areas.

The Saudis are known to be concerned about al-Qaida activity in neighboring Yemen, and in turn about its links to lawless Somalia across the Red Sea.

The conservative kingdom has been fighting suspected al-Qaida militants since they launched a wave of shootings and bombings, many targeting westerners, in May 2003. It has also run a large-scale counter-radicalization program for "repentant" jihadis, freeing and rehabilitating prisoners after they underwent courses with officially approved Muslim clerics.

Last July, the interior ministry announced that it had started forming special security units to protect the country's sensitive oil infrastructure from terrorist attacks. Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil exporter.

In April 2007, the ministry said 172 terror suspects had been rounded up along with weapons and cash. Some of those were allegedly plotting airborne attacks on oil facilities and army bases. In November it announced the arrest of 208 Saudi and foreign suspected militants allegedly involved in six cells that were plotting to attack an oil support facility, to assassinate clerics and security personnel and to smuggle weapons into the country.

Security forces thwarted an alleged al-Qaida attack against Saudi Arabia's huge Abqaiq oil processing facility in February 2006. Two members of the security forces and two assailants were killed.