ZAMBOANGA, PHILIPPINES // Philippine authorities on Wednesday probed an assassination attempt against an influential Saudi preacher who was on ISIL’s hit list.
The lone gunman was killed and two suspects arrested in the attack that took place in the southern port city of Zamboanga on Tuesday.
Preacher Ayed Al Qarni and a Saudi diplomat, Sheikh Turki Assaegh, were wounded in the shooting as they left a university auditorium where the cleric had given an address.
Their Filipino police escorts killed the assailant, while two other suspects who were seen with the gunman were arrested as they tried to escape.
“It all happened so fast. Suddenly there were gunshots,” said local Muslim community leader Wakil Kasim, who was at the auditorium at the time of the incident.
The gunman “popped up from the crowd, moved in close and shot the victim” as he was getting into his car, said police chief inspector Helen Galvez, adding that the gunman then walked to the other side of the vehicle and shot the Saudi diplomat.
Mr Al Qarni was shot in the right shoulder, left arm and chest, while Mr Assaegh, a religious attaché at the Saudi embassy in Manila, was wounded in his right thigh and left leg, according to police.
A student driver’s licence and a local government ID were recovered from the man, which identified him as a 21-year-old Filipino, but police said they were not ruling out forgery.
A uniform for engineering students in the Western Mindanao State University, where Mr Al Qarni was speaking, was found in his backpack, but university officials could not immediately confirm the gunman was enrolled at the institution.
Television footage showed the gunman, who was wearing a hoodie, sprawled face down on the ground beside the victims’ car.
ISIL militants, who control vast areas of Iraq and Syria, had called on "lone wolves" to attack Mr Al Qarni and several other Saudi clerics, whom they accuse of apostasy in the latest issue of Dabiq, their monthly online magazine. Filipino authorities have not linked ISIL sympathisers to the attack.
Saudi media outlets described Mr Al Qarni as a senior Islamic scholar who has more than 12 million followers on Twitter. In his book Awakening Islam, the French academic Stephane Lacroix included Mr Qarni in his list of "the most famous" Saudi preachers.
Last week, the Saudi embassy in Manila asked local police for increased security for its premises and for the Saudi national airline due to an unspecified threat, a Philippine foreign affairs spokesman said.
Zamboanga is one of the largest cities in the southern Philippines – an area troubled by a decades-long separatist rebellion by the mainly Catholic nation’s Muslim minority that has claimed more than 100,000 lives.
The port city has a mixed Christian and Muslim population, and has been a frequent target of attacks by local Muslim militant groups.
* Agence France-Presse
