The Interior Ministry said it launched raids in
Jiddah province, as well as two areas in Mecca itself, including the
Ajyad Al-Masafi neighborhood, located near the Grand Mosque.
There, police said they engaged in a shootout at a
three-story house a suicide bomber, who blew himself up and led to the
building’s collapse. He was killed while the blast wounded six
foreigners and five members of the security forces, according to the
Interior Ministry’s statement. Five others were arrested, it said.
The Interior Ministry "confirms that this terrorist network,
whose terrorist 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-Qaida insurgency for
years and more recently has faced attacks from a local branch of the
Islamic State group.
The disrupted attack comes at a sensitive time in Saudi
Arabia as King Salman earlier this week short-circuited the kingdom’s
succession by making his son, Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman,
first in line to the throne. The newly appointed crown prince, 31 years
old, is the architect of Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen against Shiite
rebels, now stalemated. He has also offered aggressive comments about
the kingdom confronting Shiite power Iran.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries have cut
diplomatic ties to neighboring Qatar and are trying to isolate the
energy-rich tiny country over its alleged support of militants and ties
to Iran. Qatar long has denied those allegations.
The Grand Mosque has been the target of militants before. In
1979, a group of militants seized the mosque, home to the cube-shaped
Kaaba that Muslims pray toward five times a day, for two weeks as they
demanded the royal family abdicate the throne. The official toll of the
assault and subsequent fighting to retake the mosque from hundreds of
armed militants was over 100 people killed and 500 wounded.
