Saudi authorities have arrested three brothers linked to a suicide bombing by a Saudi man on a Shiite Muslim mosque in Kuwait last month, Saudi state news agency SPA reported yesterday.
The radical Sunni Islamic State group said it carried out the attack, which killed 27 people and appeared aimed at stoking sectarian hatred in the energy-rich Gulf.
The three Saudi brothers, who were not identified, were “parties to the crime of the sinful terrorist bombing that targeted the Imam al-Sadeq mosque in Kuwait,” SPA quoted a Saudi Ministry of the Interior security spokesman as saying.
One was arrested in Kuwait and was extradited to the kingdom, another was arrested in the western city of Taif and a third was taken into custody after a shootout at a house near the Kuwaiti border that wounded two police officers.
A fourth brother lives in Syria and is a member of the Islamic State group, formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the security spokesman added.
The bombing was Kuwait’s deadliest militant attack, and the most deadly in any of the six hereditary-ruled Gulf Arab states since a campaign of al-Qaeda bombings was stamped out in Saudi Arabia a decade ago.
The attack has raised concerns about the number of young Saudi Arabian men willing to travel to attack Shiites in smaller Gulf Arab states to carry out a threat by the Islamic State group to step up violence in the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
The group claimed two suicide bombings carried out on May 22 and May 29 on Shiite mosques in eastern Saudi Arabia, where the bulk of Saudi Arabia’s Shiite minority lives.
The Saudi branch of the militant group has said it wants to clear the Arabian Peninsula of Shi’ites and urged young men in the kingdom to join its cause.
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