A threat bearing the hallmarks of the Al-Qaeda terror network and vowing to attack Western airlines may be designed to create fear but inevitably recalls the 9/11 suicide hijackings at a time when Islamic militants are striking at the heart of Saudi Arabia.
An Islamist website published a statement on Monday in the name of Al-Qaeda threatening to attack Western airlines and sites frequented by Westerners in the Arabian peninsula.
"The residential compounds, the bases and the means of transportation of the Crusaders, especially Western and US airlines, will be the direct target of our next operations," the statement said.
The menace, which coincides with the start of the holiday season, cannot be ignored.
British Airways was hit by a series of terror alerts early this year, with a flight to Riyadh cancelled twice and one service from London to Washington called off five times amid fears that terrorists might attempt a September 11 style attack.
Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda has been blamed for repeated attacks on compounds housing Westerners and Arabs in Saudi Arabia in the last year in which more than 85 people have been killed.
The latest took place Sunday evening when gunmen shot dead an Irish cameraman and gravely wounded a BBC correspondent on the street of a Riyadh slum known as a hotbed of extremism.
British reporter Frank Gardner, 42, was in hospital Tuesday after emergency surgery to remove bullets from his stomach and legs.
A doctor said Monday night that Gardner, an expert on Al-Qaeda, was still unconscious but stable and they were "hopeful about him".
Freelance cameraman Simon Cumbers, 36, died outside the home of a top wanted militant who was shot dead by security forces in the same district last December.
Despite a relentless hunt, presumed Al-Qaeda supporters have escalated attacks across the vast conservative kingdom since April, making a mockery of repeated official pledges, from King Fahd down, to wipe out terrorism:
- four gunmen killed 22 people including Westerners in a rampage and hostage-taking drama in the eastern oil city of Al-Khobar on May 28 and 29.
- a German national was shot dead in Riyadh on May 22
- six died in the April 21 bombing of a security forces building in the capital.
- six Westerners - two Americans, two Britons, an Australian and a Canadian - were killed when gunmen went on a shooting spree at a petrochemical plant in the Red Sea industrial port of Yanbu on May 1.
- one American serviceman was slightly wounded when shots were fired at vehicles carrying US military personnel on a highway outside Riyadh on June 2.
After the Al-Khobar bloodshed, Australia and Britain led warnings of worse to come, with the Foreign Office in London seeing a threat of an imminent strike and media reporting that intelligence agencies feared a spectacular attack.
Washington had already warned on May 26 that Al-Qaeda was preparing a major strike in the United States in the months before the November presidential election.
The call to arms from Bin Laden, scion of one of Saudi's wealthiest families and mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States which killed nearly 3,000 people, has found a singular echo among the youth of the fiercely Muslim kingdom.
Fifteen of the 19 suicide hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, a fact long denied by many officials in Riyadh. The government and population struggled to come to terms with the scale of the scourge until bombs started going off inside the kingdom a little over a year ago and Saudi launched its own war on terror in earnest.
Al-Qaeda also vowed in the latest statement to continue its "jihad" or holy war and warned Muslims not to tolerate Westerners in the Arab peninsula.
"We reiterate our warning to our Muslim brothers against the presence of the Crusaders including Americans, Westerns and all other infidels in the Arab peninsula," it said.
"The Muslims should isolate them completely," read the statement published on the website (http://www.hostinganime.com/neda2/sout/tag13.jpg).
"We renew our warning to the security services, to the guards at the housing complexes of the Crusaders and at the American bases and all others who are on the side of the Americans and against the mujahedeen and to their agents in the Saudi government."
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