Riyadh: Saudi authorities have blamed a deadly attack targeting Shiite worshippers during a major religious festival on militants linked to Al Qaida.

Masked gunmen late on Monday killed five Shiites marking Ashura, one of the holiest festivals of their calendar, in the kingdom’s oil-rich east.

The next day two Saudi policemen and two suspects linked to the incident died in a shootout in Qassim region, north of the capital Riyadh.

Officers rounded up 15 suspects in several cities after the initial shooting in the Shiite-populated Eastern Province.

Security forces shot dead two suspected members of the armed group.

“They are followers of the deviant ideology,” interior ministry spokesman General Mansour Al Turki was quoted by the Asharq Al Awsat daily as saying.

He used the term by which Saudi authorities describe the ideology of Al Qaida. No group has so far claimed the attack.

The attack was condemned by an official council of top Sunni Muslim scholars as a “vicious assault and a heinous crime whose perpetrators deserve the harshest religious penalties”.

But some residents complained that the problem was with institutions and individuals who regard Shiites as heretics and justify attacks on them.

Radical Islamist groups consider Shiites heretics and have targeted them elsewhere in the region, including attacks that killed more than 40 people in Baghdad in the 48 hours preceding the peak of Ashura on Tuesday.

The Ashura commemorations mark the killing of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad (PBUH), by the army of the Caliph Yazid in 680AD.

Citing medical sources, Asharq Al Awsat said the attack left eight people dead and seven wounded. Police gave a different toll of five dead and nine wounded.

Turki said that security services had in the past 24 hours hunted down suspects involved in the “terrorist” attack in six Saudi cities.

In Tehran, the Foreign Ministry also condemned the attack and called on the Saudi government to identify and punish the perpetrators, state news agency ISNA said on Wednesday.

Kuwait strongly condemned the attack.

“This cowardly terrorist act is in complete violation of values and heavenly faiths, and aims at destabilising security in the brotherly Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as terrorising civilians,” Kuwaiti First Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Shaikh Sabah Khaled Al Hamad Al Sabah, said in a statement to Kuwait News Agency, KUNA.

Protests and sporadic attacks on security forces have wracked Shiite areas of Eastern Province where the community complains of marginalisation.

Saudi courts began in June 2011 to pass sentence on hundreds of people accused of involvement in bloody Al Qaida attacks across the Gulf kingdom from 2003 to 2006.

The government launched a relentless crackdown on the extremist network, including a campaign of arrests, to wipe out the local Al Qaida branch.

— Reuters, AFP and WAM