Dubai: Saudi police arrested six suspects Tuesday in a deadly overnight shooting against Shiites in the oil-rich east of the kingdom, the interior ministry said.
Police detained the suspects in multiple raids in Eastern Province and the Riyadh region, ministry spokesman General Mansour Al Turki said in a statement.
Police are referring to the attack on a Shiite village in the east of the country as a “terrorist” crime, according to DPA.
Masked gunmen killed five people in a mostly Shiite area of eastern Saudi Arabia late on Monday, as the community prepared to mark Ashura.
“As a group of citizens was leaving a building... three masked men opened fire at them with machine guns and pistols,” the Interior Ministry spokesman said, according to SPA, adding that the incident was under investigation.
Nine people were also wounded in the shooting, the latest in a spate of sporadic unrest in the oil-rich east of the kingdom where most its estimated two million Shiites live.
Saudi-owned Al Arabiya reported that the majority of those injured in the attack were children, adding that the governer of Al Ahsa, Prince Bader Bin Jalwi, paid some of the a visit at King Fahad Hospital in the city of Hufoof.
The three assailants fired machineguns and pistols on a crowd leaving a building in the village of Al Dalwa in the Al Ahsa district of Eastern Province, a police spokesman cited by the official SPA news agency said.
The spokesman did not specify what the building was or what motive the gunmen might have had.
But in postings on social networking sites, residents said that the crowd had been leaving a Shiite place of worship on the eve of Ashura, one the Shiite calendar’s holiest days.
Saudi Arabia’s Council of Senior Scholar’s, an Islamic clerical body appointed by the king, issued a statement calling the shooting a “criminal act” and called on citizens to stand as “a united front against those treacherous criminals”. It also called them “enemies of this faith and this nation who want to undermine the nation’s unity and stability”.
The governer of Al Ahsa, Prince Bader Al Jalwi, said during a visit to King Fahad Hospital in Hufoof that Al Ahsa “will remain united” in fighting such attacks, calling it a “dispicable, criminal act of terrorism that harms the image of Islam and Muslims”. He added that such acts were rejected.
A local rights activist said that the victims were mostly young men who were standing at the entrance of the local gathering place, known as Hussainiya, where the commemorative ceremony was taking place.
“It seems the criminals were in a hurry and opened fire on youngsters at the entrance and fled,” Ali Al Bahrani, a local rights activist said.
He said there were reports that Saudi security forces had found a vehicle apparently used by the attackers, with automatic weapons inside it, and arrested one person in connection with the attack.
“This seems to be the work of criminals and terrorists trying to mix cards, but security authorities seem determined to strike with an iron fist,” he said.
A local online newspaper, http://www.hasanews.com/, earlier reported that six people were killed and 12 were wounded, some seriously, in what it called a “terrorist attack” on the ceremonies in the village.
Videos purporting to show the aftermath of the attack posted to social media showed a body lying in a pool of blood outside a building, with people milling around calling for help. The authenticity of the videos could not immediately be confirmed.
One of the videos showed a man holding spent bullet casings at the bloodstained entrance to what appears to be a Shiite place of worship.
Reacting to the attacks, the Bahraini foreign minister Shaikh Khaled Bin Ahmad Al Khalifa extended his condolences on Twitter, adding that had it not been for the vigilance of the country’s security forces, a similar attack could not have been ruled out in his country. Bahrain has a large Shiite population. “Thank you to the interior ministry,” he tweeted.
The commemoration of Ashura, which marks the death of Hussain Bin Ali, the grandson of Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) and one of Shiite Islam’s most revered figures, peaks on Tuesday.
Protests and sporadic attacks on security forces have wracked Shiite areas of Eastern Province where the community complains of marginalisation.
Tensions escalated last month after a Saudi court handed down a death sentence against leading Shiite cleric Nimr Al Nimr, a driving force behind the demonstrations.
Protests erupted in the region in February 2011 after an outbreak of violence between Shiite pilgrims and religious police in the Muslim holy city of Madinah.
They escalated after the kingdom’s intervention in neighbouring Bahrain later that year to support the government against an uprising led by the Shiite community.
Hundreds were arrested in a subsequent crackdown, according to Amnesty International.
Al Nimr was shot and wounded during his arrest in July 2012 rekindling tensions in the region.
After his death sentence for sedition on October 15, his family accused the court of ignoring his “peaceful and non-violent approach,” saying the case had caused “social and political discontent”.
Three days later, gunmen fired on a security patrol in the east, setting fire to an oil pipeline.
- with inputs from AFP and Reuters
