A pan-Arab satellite TV station broadcast excerpts Thursday from a purported al-Qaida video showing one of its militants describing how he killed foreigners in Saudi Arabia.
The station Al-Arabiya identified the militant as Sultan al-Otaibi, a top al-Qaida operative killed in one of two suicide attacks on Saudi security services in the capital, Riyadh, on Dec. 29, 2004. He had been on the kingdom’s list of 26 most-wanted suspects.
The broadcast showed a young bearded man in a white robe speaking in front of a plain white background. The sound was inaudible, but the newscaster said the man described firing a rocket-propelled grenade that killed a Saudi security official and of taking part in the separate killings of four foreigners in Riyadh. It was not immediately possible to confirm those events.
An Al-Arabiya editor told The Associated Press that the Dubai-based station took the footage from a 68-minute video it found on a militant Islamic Web site. The AP has been unable to gain access to the subscriber-only site.
Saudi Arabia launched an aggressive anti-terror campaign in May 2003 after al-Qaida-linked suicide attacks on three residential compounds in Riyadh. The campaign has captured or killed most of the kingdom’s top terror suspects and detained hundreds of people.
