Al-Qaeda’s suspected leader in Saudi Arabia was reported killed on Friday night, after the group he was believed to lead said it had beheaded a kidnapped United States engineer. It posted what appeared to be three photographs of the American’s body on an Islamist website.
Shortly after the announcement, Saudi security sources said they had killed three militants in a gun battle in the capital, Riyadh. A senior security source said Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin (31) was among those killed. It was reported he was surrounded after dumping the body of the American.
”Yes it is correct, he was killed with two other senior militants,” the source told the Reuters news agency.
Al-Arabiya television named the two other militants as brothers Faisal and Bandar al-Dakheel, who were on a Saudi interior ministry list of 26 top fugitives in the kingdom.
Saudi security forces had surrounded the militants in the Malazz district of Riyadh after the body of the kidnapped American, Paul Johnson (49) was found earlier in the evening.
In a video circulated last Tuesday, the group Muqrin was suspected of leading — which calls itself al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — said it would kill Johnson, who was taken hostage last weekend, unless the Saudi authorities released ”holy warriors” from jail by Friday.
”In answer to what we promised, the infidel [Johnson] got his fair treatment,” the group said in an online statement on Friday night. ”Let him taste something of what Muslims have long tasted from Apache helicopter fire and missiles.”
Saudi security officials said Johnson’s body was found in the rural al-Munisiya district, 40km north-east of Riyadh.
He worked on targeting and night vision systems for Apache helicopters, and the militants had cited his job as one of the reasons why he was kidnapped.
One of three photographs posted on a militants’ website showed a man’s severed head, face toward the camera, being held by a hand. The other two showed a beheaded body with the head placed in the small of his back.
The man in the pictures was clad in a bright orange suit reminiscent of the those worn by suspected militants imprisoned by the US at Guantánamo Bay.
President George Bush described the killers as ”barbaric people”. ”America will not be intimidated by these extremist thugs,” he said.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said: ”These kinds of brutal acts do not help anybody. I hope the perpetrators would eventually be brought to justice because we cannot tolerate this kind of behaviour in today’s world.”
Johnson, an employee of the US defence contractor Lockheed Martin, was the first westerner to be kidnapped in a wave of militant attacks in the kingdom that began more than a year ago.
The kidnapping, which followed a spate of suicide bombings and shootings in the past six weeks, has raised the stakes in al-Qaeda’s war against the Saudi government.
Muqrin was also the main suspect in the shootings of a German citizen and an American in the kingdom recently.
In the hunt for Johnson and his kidnappers, more than 15 000 Saudi officers were deployed in a search of Riyadh, going from door to door in areas regarded as mil itant strongholds. More than 1 200 Saudi homes had been searched by Thursday night.
On Friday Sheikh Saleh bin Abdullah al-Humaid became the highest-ranking Saudi cleric to denounce the kidnapping and killing of westerners.
”Killing a soul without justification is one of the gravest sins under Islam, it is as bad as polytheism,” he said in a sermon at the Grand Mosque in Mecca. ”The blood of people under our protection is forbidden — they are on a par with Muslims.”
Although the sheikh is a state-appointed cleric, several anti-government scholars have expressed similar views during the last few days. – Guardian Unlimited Â