Saudi breaks up IS network, arrests 431 members: ministry

Saudi authorities announced Saturday that they have broken up an organisation linked to the Islamic State group and have so far arrested 431 of its members, mostly Saudis.

Authorities have "managed over the past few weeks to destroy an organisation made of a cluster of cells, which is linked to the terrorist Daesh organisation," the interior ministry said, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

Network members were engaged in a "plot managed from areas of unrest abroad, with the aim of sowing sectarian sedition and spreading chaos," the ministry said.

The cells were involved in several attacks and plots, including the deadly suicide bombings that hit Shiite mosques in the kingdom's Eastern Province, it said.

The ministry also said it arrested 144 others for “supporting ISIS cells” in Saudi Arabia.

The statement described some of the cells and their tasks. In one cell, which was made of five members, their tasks was to prepare suicide bombers while another five-member cell had the mission to manufacture explosive belts.

The authorities succeeded in thwarting schemes for terrorist operations that were scheduled to be implemented on Friday the ninth day of the month of the holy month of fasting Ramadan, to coincide with the IS’s two other operations that took place in Kuwait and Tunisia.

The ministry of interior stated that the thwarted operations were aimed at diplomatic missions, mosques and security and government facilities in the town of Sharurah in the Najran province, south of the country.

In May, IS claimed responsibility for an explosion at mosque in al-Qadeeh village in eastern Saudi Arabia during Friday prayers, which killed 20 people.

Weeks later another Shiite mosque, al-Anoud, was also targeted. Four people were killed in the Eastern Province’s capital Dammam.

IS controls swathes of neighbouring Iraq and Syria, and has claimed widespread abuses including the beheading of foreign hostages.

Saudi Arabia and its Sunni Gulf neighbours last year joined a US-led military coalition bombing IS in Syria, raising concerns about possible retaliation in the kingdom.