Saudis Kill Al-qaida Leader

Saudi Arabia's security forces killed the regional leader of al-Qaida yesterday in a gun battle in the holy city of Medina, the interior ministry reported last night.

Former prison guard Salih al-Awfi, 39, was among up to six militants said to have died during a series of police swoops in Medina and the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

According to a government statement, police raided six al-Qaida hideouts in Medina, near the mosque where the Prophet Muhammad was buried, before coming across a seventh house where Awfi and two others were holed up.

"They [the militants] opened fire heavily on the security forces and pedestrians," before police returned fire, the statement said.

"Investigators were able to prove through verification procedures that one of the two killed is the wanted Salih al-Awfi," it added.

Officials said 10 suspected militants were arrested during the raids in Medina, where the country's new monarch, King Abdullah, was meeting clerics and tribal leaders.

In Riyadh, police raided a flat in al-Massef district early yesterday, triggering a gunfight with militants. Conflicting reports from officials put the number of dead in that raid at either two or four.

After the clashes, police entered the flat and found weapons, explosives and various documents, according to the interior ministry.

"Security forces during the early morning stormed a number of places in Riyadh and Medina, where it is suspected some of those affiliated to the deviant group were hiding," an interior ministry spokesman, General Mansour al-Turki, said in a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency.

"Deviant" is the usual Saudi term for supporters of al-Qaida.

Although 15 of the 19 hijackers responsible for the September 11 attacks came from Saudi Arabia, the kingdom was reluctant to admit that al-Qaida had a significant presence on its territory.

That changed in 2003 when bomb attacks on housing compounds in the capital killed 35 people. Up to that point it also appeared that large numbers of Saudis shared al-Qaida's general political and religious outlook.

The Saudi authorities have been trying to persuade a once-reluctant public to report suspicious activity, and the latest raids are a sign that their effort is beginning to pay off, Neil Quilliam, an analyst at the security consultants Control Risks said yesterday.

"People are now more tuned in to passing on information," he said. "The public diplomacy campaign is working quite well.

"We can expect more raids in the coming months ... Each raid leads to two or three more."

Awfi is the third head of al-Qaida to be killed in the kingdom in the past 17 months. He was originally number five on the kingdom's most-wanted list.

He was believed to be a cousin of Majed Moqed, one of hijackers aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11 2001.

He took over leadership of the group known as "al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula" in June last year after Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, the previous leader, was killed in a gun battle.