AL-QAEDA has urged supporters in Saudi Arabia to kidnap Christians and Saudi princes to press for the release of a female militant the group says was nabbed north of Riyadh.
“Form cells to kidnap Christians and princes from the Saud family and their top officials of ministers and officers,” Saeed al-Shihri, a prominent Saudi leader of Al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen, said in an audio message released overnight.
He said “preacher” Heila al-Qsayer, a widow of a Saudi al-Qaeda militant killed six years ago by the Saudi authorities, was arrested in Qassim, north of the capital, but did not specify when.
“We tell our soldiers: You have to kidnap in order to release the prisoners,” he said.
The Dubai based Al-Arabiya news channel described Qsayer as “the most dangerous woman” in al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia.
Shihri, who is purportedly number two in the Yemen-based al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, insisted families of prisoners held in Saudi Arabia should take up arms to secure their release instead of grovelling to officials.
“Stop knocking at the doors of the tyrants and their deviant ulemas,” he said. “If you want your relatives to be released from prison, they will only be out by the same way they were taken in.”
Al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia had launched a deadly wave of attacks against Westerners and government installations in 2003, but have been dealt severe blows by the authorities, forcing them eventually to regroup in Yemen.
Saudi and Yemeni militants announced merging their factions in Yemen in January last year, as intelligence reports have warned Yemen has become a regrouping haven for al-Qaeda veterans.
Authorities in the state have launched a fierce military campaign against AQAP, which has claimed responsibility for the botched attempt to blow up a US airliner over Detroit.
Yemen is the ancestral homeland of the Saudi-born al-Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, who has been stripped of his Saudi nationality.
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