Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, Saudi Arabia’s most wanted al Qaeda leader who claimed recent attacks on the oil industry, is a hardened militant driven by revenge and hate for the United States and pro-American Arab rulers. The al Qaeda chief in the Arabian Peninsula is a veteran of Bosnia’s 1992-95 war between Muslims, Serbs and Croats. He was also one of a hit squad that tried to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa during an African summit in 1995, according to Mohsen al-Awajy, an expert on Islamist militants. He spent two years in jail in Ethiopia and was extradited to Saudi Arabia in 1998. He served two years at al Ruweis prison in the Red Sea port of Jeddah, where he was subjected to “intolerable torture”, Awajy said. “After his release he acted as an avenger... He is a killer,” added Awajy, an Islamist reformist who has tried to mediate between the Saudi government and militants over the past year to persuade them to lay down their arms. “He is shallow, very simple-minded. He has no political brain. He’s got the weapon and no mind to control this weapon,” Awajy told Reuters.
Muqrin felt that revenge against what he saw as U.S. policies hostile to Muslims and Arabs in the Israeli-occupied territories, Iraq and Afghanistan was a duty, he said. Twenty-two people, mostly foreigners, were killed last weekend in a shooting and hostage-taking spree against oil firms and Western compounds in the vital eastern oil city of Khobar. It was the second major attack on the Saudi oil industry, a lifeline of the West’s economy, in under a month and sent oil prices to record highs on fears of instability in the world’s leading exporter. The government said production was unaffected.
Al Qaeda has pledged to destabilise the kingdom, whose leaders it considers minions of the West, and to rid the birthplace of Islam of “infidels”.
An audio tape apparently from Muqrin vowed this year would be “bloody and miserable” for Saudi Arabia. Muqrin issued plans for urban guerilla warfare designed to topple the royal family. Muqrin’s group swiftly claimed responsibility for the Khobar attack. In his latest purported statement on Friday, Muqrin hailed the Khobar attacks as a “victory”. He also gloated over last month’s killing of five Westerners in a petrochemical complex, the murder of a German in Riyadh two weeks ago and an attack on U.S. military personnel near Riyadh this week. “The operation in Khobar was a new victory which God bestowed upon the mujahideen and which put the Saudi government in a deep crisis,” the statement, posted on an Islamist Web site, said. “It took the oil price to its highest levels of over $42, while Saudi Arabia is committed to America’s prosperity by providing oil at the cheapest prices,” it added. In Khobar, the body of a Briton was dragged through the streets behind a car, in an echo of the attack on the petrochemical site in which an American suffered the same fate.
Awajy said he doubted the statements were being written by Muqrin himself. Saudi Arabia has been battling for over a year militants loyal to Saudi-born al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities.
Awajy, familiar with militant ideology, said there was no chance that Muqrin, who is on a list of Saudi Arabia’s 26 most wanted militants, would lay down arms. “This man...is like a wounded tiger. He has already decided to die but he wants to kill as many people as possible before he ends his life,” he said. “They (Muqrin’s group) are a minority of the minority but they are very dangerous.”