Dubai: Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Culture and Information Dr Awwad Al Awwad, has said that Qatar runs 23,000 fake Twitter accounts that have attacked Saudi Arabia, including an account run by Saudi dissident Saad Al Faqih who resides in London, according to Al Arabiya website.

Al Awwad explained that Qatar has supported accounts calling for demonstrations in Saudi Arabia on April 21 and on June 2, during Ramadan, "and luckily, these plots failed.”

Al Awwad said that the Qatar-backed accounts on Twitter aimed to incite the Saudi public. “This is a national security issue that will not be tolerated,” he was quoted as saying by the website.

His statements, posted on a Ministry of Culture and Information official Twitter account came after a content analysis undertaken on a number of accounts that attacked Saudi Arabia.

The findings were revealed by Saud Al Qahtani, Adviser of the Saudi Royal court and the General Supervisor of the Centre for Studies and Information Affairs.

According to the study, the sources of these accounts attacking Saudi Arabia were as follows: 32 per cent from Qatar, 28 per cent from Lebanon, 24 per cent from Turkey and 12 per cent from Iraq.

The study also confirmed that 94 per cent of the false accounts do not use a real profile picture, 4 per cent of them use stolen images from social media sites and 2 per cent were not verified.

Meanwhile, the Embassy of Germany in Saudi Arabia has confirmed that German Foreign Minister Sigmar Hartmut Gabriel did not make any statement to Qatar’s Al Jazeera TV channel.

The embassy said in a statement issued on Saturday and carried by Saudi Press Agency (SPA) that on to the information we received on rumours about the statements of German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel on Qatar, we would like to clarify the following:

— The German foreign minister did not make any statement to Al Jazeera.

— Reuters news agency transmitted a statement by the German foreign minister in which he said that “The real issue at this moment is that Qatar must stop supporting and financing terrorists and interfering in the internal affairs of other countries.”

— In another statement made by the German foreign minister on the demands made by the four countries calling for combating terrorism, the German foreign minister said that “We did not find any of the demands submitted that may affect the sovereignty of the State of Qatar.”

— With additional inputs from WAM