Saudis warn of AQAP attack on France
I’m not sure the threat is wholly distinct from the alerts from Pakistan regarding Europe, especially if Fahd al Quso is/was at the summit. Or if it has anything to do with the AQAP/security officer/ Anwar disciple who killed the French national recently. Maybe Anwar got them all riled up against France. In a relatively minor discrepancy, Yemen reported Al Fayfi was captured during the battle of Lauder, while the Saudis are saying he surrendered to Yemeni authorities.
Update: Saudis confirm issuing warning about a new AQAP threat to Europe.
Telegraph: Saudi intelligence services have warned of a new terror threat from al-Qaeda against Europe, particularly in France, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said yesterday. He said the warning of a potential attack by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was received “in the last few hours, few days.”
European officials were informed that “al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula was doubtless active or envisioned being active” on the “European continent, notably France … The threat is real,” he said on RTL-LCI-Le Figaro’s weekly talk show.
The warning from Saudi Arabia is the latest in a series of alerts that have put security forces, including in Britain, in high-vigilance mode…The warning may be linked to a series of arrests announced in recent days of senior operatives of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula…
However, at the beginning of last month, Saudi police say, one of the former Guantánamo inmates, Jabir Jubran al-Fayfi, contacted them to say he wanted to return home. He handed himself in to the Yemeni authorities, and was transferred to Riyadh.
In the last few days, the Yemen state news agency Saba has reported the subsequent arrests at Sana’a airport of Khaled al-Obeidi, a Yemeni accused of kidnapping a Japanese engineer in 2009, and, more significantly, Salah al-Raimi, 33, a Saudi citizen who appears to have been able to coordinate financing for al-Qaeda operations from his home in the kingdom.
The Saudi authorities have yet to comment on the French revelations, and a spokesman for the interior minister could not be contacted last night.
However, if the warning is connected to the latest arrests, it would make the threat separate from the recent alert over attacks in European cities which were said to be intended to follow the model of the Mumbai killings of November 2008. That alert was said to emanate from a group of jihadists based on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
