July 24, 2008	Thursday	Rajab 20, 1429

RIYADH, July 23: Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Pakistan denied an Al Qaeda claim that a suicide attacker who bombed the Danish embassy in Islamabad last month was a Saudi, in comments published on Wednesday.

“No Saudi was involved in the terrorist attack against the Danish embassy in Pakistan,” Ambassador Ali Awadh Assiri said, quoted by the Saudi-owned pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat.

“The attacker was not even Arab. According to documented official information, the features of the attacker were not close to Arab features,” he said.

A senior Al Qaeda leader said in a television interview aired on Monday that the suicide attacker came from Saudi Arabia.

Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, an Egyptian Al Qaeda commander based in Afghanistan, told a Pakistani private TV channel that the bomber was a young man who had come to the region to wage holy war in Afghanistan or Kashmir.

“This young martyr came from the holy land of Makkah to wage jihad in Afghanistan or Kashmir, but when infidels committed blasphemy he did not like to live with that insult,” Al Yazid said.“That young man strongly insisted that he take part in this suicide bombing and Allah gave him the courage to do that,” he added.

Al Yazid has been named by US officials as Al Qaeda’s commander in Afghanistan and was identified by the 9/11 Commission as the group’s chief financial manager.

The June 2 embassy bombing killed six Pakistanis, one of them with a dual Danish nationality, and came amid anger in the Muslim world over sacrilegious cartoons first printed in Danish newspapers in 2005.—AFP