Monday, June 21, 2004

Al Qaeda chief killed after American beheaded

Jordan Times, Sunday, June 20, 2004

RIYADH (Reuters) — Saudi authorities said on Saturday they had killed Al Qaeda's leader in the kingdom and three other prominent Al-Qaeda members, hours after the group carried out its threat to behead US hostage Paul Johnson. State television broadcast pictures of four bloodied corpses. It named the dead men as Abdulaziz Muqrin, Saudi Arabia's most wanted man, and three others behind the recent surge of violence against foreigners in the kingdom.

Twelve others were arrested, including one senior Al-Qaeda member believed to have been involved in the 2000 bombing of the US warship Cole off the coast of neighboring Yemen.

"This is a massive blow to Al-Qaeda," a source close to Saudi security officials said. "A huge number of the group around Muqrin were taken out last night — killed or arrested."

The men were killed in a shoot-out on Friday night as they tried to dispose of the body of Johnson, who was beheaded after the Saudi government refused to free prisoners by a Friday deadline set by Muqrin's cell.

Muqrin's group had posted photographs of Johnson's severed head on a website, six days after the 49-year-old aviation engineer was kidnapped in Riyadh.

The televised pictures of the four dead Al-Qaeda members appeared aimed at refuting a purported Al Qaeda statement posted on a website which denied Muqrin was dead.

An interior ministry statement read out on television named the other three dead militants as Faisal Dakheel, Turki Muteiri and Ibrahim Dreihim. Dakheel was wanted for killings including that of an American in Riyadh, it said. Muteiri was one of the militants who escaped after an attack on foreigners in the Gulf city of Khobar in May and Dreihim had been involved in preparation of the bombing of an expatriate residential compound in Riyadh in November, it said.

The statement said the four men were tracked down to a petrol station in the Malazz district of central Riyadh.

"Immediately security forces surrounded them and there was a fierce exchange of fire which resulted in the deaths of all four. It also resulted in the death of one member of the security forces and the wounding of two others," it said.

Security forces found three cars, including one used in an attack earlier this month on a British Broadcasting Corporation television crew in Riyadh, it added. They also found guns, three rocket propelled grenades, 16 pipe bombs, 10 handgrenades and currency worth around $37,000.

Most wanted

The 32-year-old Muqrin, driven by hatred of Washington and its Arab allies, was Saudi Arabia's most wanted Al Qaeda leader.

He was a veteran of Bosnia's 1992-95 war and one of a hit squad that tried to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia in 1995, said militant expert Mohsen Awajy.

"He's a killer. He wanted to kill as many people as he could before he died," Awajy said. Muqrin spent two years in an Ethiopian jail before extradition in 1988 to Saudi Arabia where he was tortured in prison, he added.

Saudi officials, once chided by their US allies as being soft on terrorism, are expected to portray his killing as a major setback for Saudi-born Osama Ben Laden.

Prince Salman Ben Abdulaziz, governor of Riyadh, said Saudi Arabia was working to "wipe out this corruption." But he said he could not rule out a violent response from Al Qaeda.

Johnson was the third American killed in Riyadh in the past 10 days, stepping up pressure on thousands of US citizens and other foreigners vital to the economy of the world's biggest oil exporter and on the Saudi royal family, which Ben Laden has sworn to overthrow for its close alliance with Washington.

Al-Qaeda attacks have afflicted the birthplace of Islam for more than a year but this was the first kidnapping of its kind in Saudi Arabia and raised fears that Al-Qaeda members who killed dozens of people in suicide bombings last year had switched tactics.

Three pictures of what looked like Johnson's severed, bloodied head were published on a website late on Friday. They showed the head placed on the back of a body in orange overalls and with a knife propped up against the mustachioed face.

Johnson worked for defense contractor Lockheed Martin making Apache helicopter gun ships, used by the US and Israeli military — a job his killers said justified his execution.

His family said Johnson had loved the Saudi people and that his killers were extremists who did not represent the kingdom.

The beheading followed a spate of bombings and attacks on oil companies and expatriate workers blamed on Muqrin's men. Militants killed 22 foreigners at oil offices and residential compounds in the eastern oil city of Khobar last month.

# ANTENNA SHARON | 11:55:00 am |