UAE says arrests cell planning attacks
Terrorist cell planning attacks in United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia was detained in the federation of emirates
Security forces in the United Arab Emirates have arrested a cell of UAE and Saudi Arabian citizens who were planning to carry out terrorist attacks in both countries and other states, the official news agency WAM said on Wednesday.
The US-allied UAE, a federation of seven emirates and a major oil exporter, has been spared any attack by al-Qaeda and other insurgency groups.
Related stories:
- Jordan says foiled al-Qaeda-linked terror plot
- Terror attacks quadrupled since 9/11
- Will terrorists follow rebels to border?
But some of its emirates have seen a rise in Islamist sentiment in recent years, and Dubai, a business and tourism hub cosmopolitan city that attracts many Westerners, could make an attractive target for Islamist terrorists, analysts say.
The arrested group had acquired materials and equipment for use in what WAM called terrorist operations.
"The security authorities in the UAE, in coordination with the related security parties in Saudi Arabia, announced the arrest of an organized cell from the deviant group that was planning to carry out actions against national security of both countries and some brotherly states," WAM said without elaborating.
The phrase "the deviant group" is often used by authorities in Saudi Arabia to describe al-Qaeda members.
In August, Saudi authorities arrested a group of suspected al-Qaeda-linked militants - mostly Yemeni nationals – in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia has arrested thousands of suspected militants since the 2003-2006 attacks on residential compounds for foreign workers and on Saudi government facilities in which dozens of people were killed.
The United States has poured aid into Yemen to stem the threat of attacks from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and to try to prevent any spillover of violence into Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter.
In 2010, AQAP, a merger of al-Qaeda's Yemeni and Saudi branches, said it was behind a plot to send two parcel bombs to the United States. The bombs were intercepted in Britain and Dubai.
The UAE has escaped the upheaval that has shaken the Arab world but moved swiftly to stem any sign of political dissent by detaining more than 60 local Islamists this year over alleged threats to state security and links to a foreign group.
Those detainees, who belong to an Islamist group called al-Islah, have confessed to setting up a secret organization with an armed force whose aim was to take power and establish an Islamic state, local media reported in September. Islah denied the accusations.
Many of the detained Islamists come from the more religiously conservative northern emirates such as Sharjah and Ras al-Khaimah, which produced one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
- Receive Ynetnews updates
directly to your desktop
