Riyadh // Security in Saudi Arabia is “under control”, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef said after two mosque bombings claimed by ISIL in the country’s east.
“Incidents such as this will not destabilise us. We have been through bigger ones,” said the crown prince, who previously led a crackdown on Al Qaeda in the kingdom.
“Thank God the situation is under control. And if something happens, we will deal with it when the time comes,” Crown Prince Mohammed, who is also the interior minister, told foreign ambassadors, the official Saudi Press Agency reported.
In a statement carried by extremist accounts on Twitter, ISIL said it was responsible for a suicide blast on Friday which killed three people and wounded four outside the Al Anoud mosque in Dammam city.
The attack came exactly seven days after a suicide blast at another Shiite mosque, in the nearby community of Al Qudeeh, which was also claimed by ISIL.
That bombing killed 21 people and wounded dozens in the Eastern Province, where most of the kingdom’s minority Shiite community live.
ISIL, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, considers Shiites to be heretics and has declared a “caliphate” in parts of Iraq and Syria it controls.
Crown Prince Mohammed, who spent years in Saudi Arabia’s interior ministry, personally oversaw the crackdown on Al Qaeda, which waged a campaign of shootings and bombings that killed foreigners and Saudi security personnel between 2003 and 2007.
Meanwhile, funerals for victims of the latest bombing could be held on Monday or Tuesday, a resident of the area said.
* Agence France-Presse
