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| Arabia |
| Soddies tally dead hard boyz |
| 2005-09-09 |
| The Saudi authorities have confirmed that the five militants declared dead after a three-day stand-off in the eastern city of Dammam this week are all on their most- wanted list of 36 terror suspects. A statement read out on Saudi television on Thursday morning said DNA tests had confirmed the identities of the men as: Zaid al-Sammari, 31; Salih al-Firaidi al-Harbi, 22; Sultan Salih al-Hasri, 26; Naif al-Jihaishi al-Shammari, 24; and Mohammad al-Suwailmi, 23. Al-Hasri was cited in the broadcast as having "taken part in the abduction and killing of a [foreign] resident", believed to be the American engineer Paul Johnson, kidnapped and beheaded in June 2004 at the peak of the attacks against Westerners in the kingdom. Al-Suwailmi is listed as being very skilled at using computers and the Internet. Three of the dead were thought to have been living in the al-Kharj area, near the capital Riyadh. The stand-off began on Sunday when one militant opened fire on members of the security services who were tracking him, outside a supermarket in a busy shopping street in Dammam, the main city of the oil-rich eastern province. Other militants then holed up in a building in a crowded residential neighbourhood, which the security forces surrounded. After a series of gun battles the villa was stormed on Tuesday. Four members of the security forces also died during the three-day stand-off, and several were injured. No figure has been given on how many militants died, as the interior ministry has only said that "charred remains" had been found at the site, suggesting some of the militants had blown themselves up. The ministry also explained that it took so long to storm the villa and end the stand-off because "members of the deviant group" [the official Saudi terminology for al-Qaeda suspects] had packed the site with explosives and first they had to evacuate the crowded neighbourhood. The security forces have also arrested eleven suspects of different nationalities and seized large amounts of weapons, explosives and "forged documents" which the statement said were meant to be used for entering public installations. The confirmation of the identities of the five terror suspects brings to ten the number killed or arrested from the most-wanted list of 36 released by the interior ministry at the end of June. However, the ministry believes 21 of those listed are outside the kingdom. In August the al-Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia, Saleh al-Oufi, was killed in a security operation in the holy city of Medina. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |