A suicide bomber blew himself up near the Grand Mosque in Mecca as police disrupted a plot to target the holiest site in Islam just as the holy month of Ramadan ends, Saudi security forces said yesterday.
The Saudi Ministry of the Interior said it launched a raid around Jiddah, as well as two areas in Mecca, including the Ajyad al-Masafi neighborhood near the mosque.
Police engaged in a shootout with a suicide bomber holed up in a three-story house in the neighborhood before the man blew himself up, leading to the building’s collapse, it added.
Photo: AFP
The bomber was killed while six foreigners and five security forces were wounded in the blast, the ministry said in a statement.
Five suspects were arrested, including a woman, it said.
Saudi state television aired footage showing police and rescue personnel running through the neighborhood’s narrow streets.
The blast demolished the building, its walls crushing a parked car as what appeared to be shrapnel peppered nearby structures.
The ministry “confirms that this terrorist network, whose ... plan was thwarted, violated — in what they would have perpetrated — all sanctities by targeting the security of the Grand Mosque, the holiest place on Earth.”
“They obeyed their evil and corrupt self-serving schemes managed from abroad whose aim is to destabilize the security and stability of this blessed country,” the statement said.
The ministry did not name the group involved in the attack.
The ultraconservative Sunni kingdom battled an al-Qaeda insurgency for years and has faced attacks from a local branch of the Islamic State group.
Neither group immediately claimed the arrested, although Islamic State sympathizers online have urged more attacks as an offensive in Iraq slowly squeezes the extremists out of Mosul and their de facto capital of Raqqa in Syria comes under daily bombing from a US-led coalition.
The plot comes at a sensitive time in Saudi Arabia as King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud earlier this week short-circuited the kingdom’s succession by making his son, Saudi Minister of Defense Mohammed bin Salman, first in line to the throne.
The newly appointed crown prince, 31, is the architect of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen.
He has also offered aggressive comments about the kingdom confronting Shiite power Iran.
The mosque has been the target of militants before, in part as it represents a symbol of the ruling Al Saud family’s clout in the Muslim world.
King Salman is known as the “custodian of the two holy mosques” — the other being the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina — a title used by the monarchs before him as well.
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