DUBAI: A suicide bomber killed 21 worshippers in a packed Shia mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia yesterday, residents and the health minister said, the first attack in the kingdom to be claimed by Islamic State militants.
More than 150 people were praying when the huge explosion ripped through the Imam Ali mosque in the village of Al Qadeeh, witnesses said.
A video posted online showed a hall filled with smoke and dust, with bloodied people moaning in pain as they lay on the floor littered with concrete and glass. Eighty-one people were wounded, the Saudi health ministry said, including 12 in critical condition.
“We were doing the first part of the prayers when we heard the blast,” worshipper Kamal Jaafar Hassan said by phone from the scene.
Islamic State said in a statement that one of its suicide bombers, identified as Abu ‘Ammar Al Najdi, carried out the attack using an explosives-laden belt that killed or wounded 250 people, US-based monitoring group SITE said on its Twitter account. It said it would not rest until Shias, which the group views as heretics, were driven from the Arabian peninsula.
Saudi officials have said the group is trying hard to attack the kingdom, which as the world’s top oil exporter, birthplace of Islam and champion of conservative Sunni doctrine, represents an important ally for Western countries battling Islamic State.
In November, the Sunni group’s leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi called for attacks against the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia, which has declared Islamic State a terrorist organisation, joined international air strikes against it, and mobilised top clergy to denounce it.
Last week Baghdadi issued another speech laden with derogatory comments about the Saudi leadership and the country’s Shia minority.
Yesterday’s bombing was the first attack targeting minority Shias since November, when gunmen opened fire during a religious celebration in Al Ahsa, also in the east where most of the group live in predominantly Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi Interior Ministry described the attack as an act of terrorism and said it was carried out by “agents of sedition trying to target the kingdom’s national fabric”, according to a statement carried by state news agency SPA.
The agency quoted an Interior Ministry spokesman as saying the bomber detonated a suicide belt hidden under his clothes inside the mosque.
“Security authorities will spare no effort in the pursuit of all those involved in this terrorist crime,” the official said in a statement carried by state news agency SPA.
REUTERS
