ISIS terrorists attack Saudi border post: Three takfiri khawarij killed by Saudi troops
Al Arabiya News obtained on Friday exclusive pictures of the bodies of the gunmen who attacked a border post between Yemen and Saudi Arabia killing one Saudi border security officer and one Yemeni soldier.
Sources told Al Arabiya News that the six attackers were Saudi nationals, including one who is wanted by the interior ministry.
“A security patrol came under fire from assailants, resulted in the martyrdom of its commander, which required responding to the source of fire similarly,” Saudi Interior Minister Spokesman Maj. Gen. Mansour a-Turki told the SPA news agency.
“The exchange of fire resulted in killing of three of the attackers, wounded one of them and arrested another,” the spokesman added.
Maj. Gen. al-Turki added that security forces were inspecting some buildings to which another may have resorted.
In Yemen, a security source said it was the work of suspected al-Qaeda gunmen who attacked a military post on the border, triggering a clash that killed one Yemeni soldier and wounded another, according to AFP.
The assailants used machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades to attack the Yemeni side of the Wadia post, the source said, adding that the gunmen managed to flee.
The crossing is in Yemen’s southeastern province of Hadramawt, whose rugged terrain provides hideouts for militants of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
AQAP, born in 2009 of a fusion of the Saudi and Yemeni branches of Al-Qaeda, is considered by Washington to be the jihadist network’s most dangerous affiliate.
Local Yemeni officials told AFP that Friday’s attack bore “the thumbprints of Al-Qaeda” without elaborating.
Apart from infiltrators, smugglers do a brisk business across the long and porous border between oil-rich Saudi Arabia and impoverished Yemen.
To counter illegal crossings and arms smuggling, Saudi Arabia is building a three-meter (10-foot) high fence along its southern frontier.
Taking advantage of a collapse of central authority during a 2011 uprising that forced Yemen’s veteran strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh from power, al-Qaeda seized swathes of the country’s south and east.
Saudi Arabia launched a massive crackdown on Al-Qaeda following a spate of deadly attacks in the kingdom from 2003-2006.
http://dailypakistan.com.pk/international/05-Jul-2014/119800
Two militants blow themselves up in southern Saudi Arabia
Sat, Jul 05 22:56 PM BST
By Sami Aboudi
DUBAI (Reuters) – Two suspected al Qaeda militants blew themselves up on Saturday after being trapped inside a government building in southern Saudi Arabia, the Interior Ministry said, following an attack on a border post with Yemen that also killed four security men.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said the two were part of a group of six al Qaeda militants who attacked the Wadia border post on Friday from Yemen. Three of them were killed on Friday and a fourth was captured after being injured.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has long viewed its 1,800 km (1,100 mile) border with impoverished, conflict-ridden Yemen as a major security problem and has been building a fence to deter militants and criminals.
The Interior Ministry spokesman, Mansour al-Turki, said security forces surrounded the two men on the second floor of the local intelligence service building in al-Sharurah area after they had forced their way into the building on Friday.
The militants, who Turki said had been identified as people wanted by the authorities, declined a chance to surrender.
“At an early hour this morning … the two attackers resorted to blowing themselves up,” Turki said in remarks carried by the state news agency SPA. “The attackers made no demands, nor heeded appeals by security men” to surrender, he told a news conference later in the day.
Saudi-owned al-Arabiya television earlier reported that the militants had put up “stiff resistance” to security forces surrounding them, firing automatic weapons and hurling grenades at security forces.
Saudi Arabia has been wary of potential al Qaeda infiltration across its northern border from Iraq, where militants have swept through the Sunni Muslim heartland close to the border with Saudi Arabia.
To the south, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has been waging a campaign of attacks on Yemeni government targets, raising fears the violence could spill across the border to Saudi Arabia.
“The kingdom as a whole is targeted, not only the crossing points,” Turki told journalists, adding that Saudi Arabia would not allow what he called the deviant group – a reference to al Qaeda – to achieve its goals.
Saudi Arabia, which overcame its own al Qaeda insurgency almost a decade ago, said in May that it had detained 62 suspected al Qaeda militants with links to radicals in Syria and Yemen. It said it believed they were plotting attacks on government and foreign targets in the kingdom.
SIX MILITANTS
Turki said Friday’s attack began when six militants in a car with licence plates from an unspecified Gulf Arab country arrived at the Wadia checkpoint in the Empty Quarter desert area, which links Yemen’s Hadramout province with Saudi Arabia.
The militants shot and killed the commander of a Saudi border patrol and seized his car. They made their way inside Saudi territory towards al-Sharurah.
Security forces engaged the militants in the second car, killing three and capturing the fourth. The militants also killed two other security men during the clash, Turki said.
Saudi media had earlier said the six were all Saudi nationals. Turki said authorities were conducting tests to determine the identities of the militants.
Yemen’s state news agency Saba earlier reported that a suicide bomber drove a car laden with explosives into the Yemeni side of the Wadia border crossing, killing himself and one soldier and wounding another.
After the attack, Yemeni security forces chased militants who fled from the scene in two cars into the desert, Saba said, citing a military source.
A Yemeni official, apparently referring to the same incident, earlier told Reuters the gunmen had escaped into Saudi Arabia after attacking the Yemeni border post.
The official said the attackers were al Qaeda militants. Hadramout province stretches through arid valleys and empty desert – a landscape that al Qaeda militants use to their advantage across the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia’s construction of the security fence along its border with Yemen has often been interrupted by protesting tribesmen who say it prevents them accessing pastures for their livestock.
(Reporting by Mostafa Hashem and Ali Abdelatti,; Writing by Sami Aboudi; Editing by Ralph Boulton and Mohammad Zargham)
http://uk.mobile.reuters.com/article/idUKKBN0FA04420140705?irpc=932