The statements emanating from the Saudi authorities about their neutralising an Al Qaeda cell, which was allegedly planning to carry out a terrorist strike against the Haj pilgrims and about the car bomb explosion at a Riyadh housing complex on November 9, 2003, which killed 17 foreign workers, all Sunni Muslims, do not provide a complete answer to understanding what has been happening in Saudi Arabia.

The history of Pakistan is replete with instances of Sunni terrorists killing Shias in their places of worship and during their pilgrimage to their holy places and vice versa.  Before 9/11, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and Pakistan's Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ), a Sunni extremist organisation, had massacred a large number of Shias (Hazaras) in Afghanistan.

The history of the jihadi terrorism in India's Jammu & Kashmir has seen the deaths of thousands of Sunnis at the hands of Wahabi terrorists from Pakistan.  Some were deliberately targeted and killed because they were supporting the Government and many were the unintended victims of the indiscriminate use of explosive devices, hand-grenades, mines etc by the jihadi terrorists at public places.

Many Sunnis were also the unintended victims of the Bali bombing in Indonesia in October last year.

Before 9/11, the Taliban and Gulbuddin Heckmatyar's Hizbe Islami, both Sunni organisations, had killed hundreds of Sunnis in each other's ranks during their struggle with each other to capture power in Afghanistan.

However, there have rarely been instances of Al Qaeda or any of its associates in the International Islamic Front (IIF) deliberately targeting innocent Sunni civilians either at their places of worship or while they were on pilgrimage or at their places of residence or work.  It is, therefore, difficult to accept that Al Qaeda was planning to kill the pilgrims during the Haj or that it had deliberately killed the foreign Sunni workers at the Riyadh housing complex.

A more convincing explanation for the presence of the neutralised cell in the pilgrimage area is that it was there not to carry out a terrorist strike against the pilgrims, but to facilitate the transit of jihadi terrorists from and to their places of training or their areas of operation.

Over the years, the movement of millions of Muslims from all over the world to Saudi Arabia for Haj has been exploited by Al Qaeda and other jihadi terrorist organisations to make new recruitment from amongst the pilgrims, take them clandestinely to training camps in Pakistan and (before 9/11) Afghanistan with the help of plain paper visas issued by the Pakistani diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia, bring them back to Saudi Arabia after the training and then send them back to their areas of  operation. In this way, there is no entry in their passports about their visits to Pakistan or Afghanistan.

Similarly, trained and jihad-hardened terrorists are sent to Saudi Arabia during the Haj under the garb of pilgrims and then infiltrated into other countries.  In February last, dozens of terrorists belonging to the Pakistani components of the IIF had thus gone to Saudi Arabia and from there infiltrated into Iraq even before the US-UK invasion of that country.

To facilitate such transits, different organisations of the IIF set up their presence in Saudi Arabia much before the Haj starts.  It is one such cell that seems to have been detected and neutralised by the Saudi authorities.  It is unlikely that the objective of this cell was to target the pilgrims, which would have alienated them from Al Qaeda and the IIF.

It is similarly difficult to accept at present that the car bomb which killed the foreign Sunni workers at the Riyadh housing complex was designed to deliberately kill them.  A more convincing explanation is that the real targets were either the members of the Saudi ruling families or foreign diplomats and their families elsewhere.  There is reason to believe that the car bomb fitted with the explosives was being taken to the housing complex for being kept there before being taken to the real target.  The explosion seems to have been caused by  accident or by the interception of the vehicle by the security guards at the complex.

There is no doubt that since February last, there has been an intensification in the activities of the jihadi terrorists in Saudi Arabia -- partly to destabilise the kingdom and partly to set up a rear base there for organising jihad against the US troops in Iraq.  Al Qaeda and the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) have been in the forefront of these activities. There have been unconfirmed reports that bin Laden is no longer in Pakistan or Afghanistan and that he might have moved to Yemen or Saudi Arabia to co-ordinate the jihad against the US troops in Iraq.

For some years now, the LET has had an active presence in Saudi Arabia, which has not been neutralised by the Saudi authorities. There is a growing threat to the stability of the kingdom. The LET and Al Qaeda want to capture power in Saudi Arabia, proclaim the establishment of a Caliphate there with Osama bin Laden as the Amir and use Saudi Arabia as the rear base for the jihad against the crusaders and the Jewish people. 

If they succeed, it is likely to aggravate the already existing threats to the peace and security of the region from the jihadi terrorists and affect energy security . 

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B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai, and Convenor, Advisory Committee, Observer Research Foundation (ORF),Chennai Chapter.