Fri Jul 17, 2015 11:08:01
A suicide bomber wounded two policemen at a checkpoint near a high-security prison in the Saudi capital Riyadh in an attack claimed by the Islamic State terrorist group, AFP reports.
The group said that the bomber, identified by Saudi authorities as Abdullah al-Rashid, 19, had also killed his uncle, a colonel in the interior ministry, before blowing himself up, the SITE Intelligence monitoring group said.
ISIS's branch in Najd, the central region of Saudi Arabia, said on its Twitter account that Thursday's attack was a message to terrorists held in Riyadh's Al-Hair prison that they had not been forgotten.
“Let the captives in Al-Hair and everywhere know that we will not relent or tire until we release them from imprisonment,” SITE quoted the tweet as saying.
ISIS named the slain colonel as Rashid Ibrahim al-Sufyan and said that Rashid had machine-gunned him in his own home.
The wounded policemen were in a “stable condition” in hospital, the interior ministry said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency.
The jihadist group, which controls swathes of Iraq and Syria, has expanded its operations into Saudi Arabia and neighboring Kuwait and Yemen this year with a string of deadly attacks.
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