RIYADH, June 25: Saudi Arabia has arrested 701 people in the past six months on suspicion of plotting attacks on oil industry installations, the interior ministry announced on Wednesday.

Security forces “carried out several operations against followers of the deviant ideology and arrested a total of 701 people of various nationalities,” said a ministry spokesman quoted by the official SPA news agency.

Of those arrested since the start of the year, “520 are still being held for their implication in the organisational and ideological plans of the deviant ideology.”

’Deviant ideology’ is the term used by Saudi officials to describe Al Qaeda.

The ministry did not give the nationalities of those arrested but stressed that the masterminds lived abroad and were recruiting foreigners – among them pilgrims from around the world – to carry out attacks.

“Chiefs of the sedition abroad have engaged in recruiting nationals in Asian and African countries to carry out operations in Saudi Arabia, taking advantage of the facilities granted to the Muslim faithful to come to Makkah for the annual pilgrimage or to do the Umrah,” the official said.

“The cells that have been broken up, which were run from abroad, were primarily targeting economic targets in the country” – the world’s second-largest oil producer and its largest exporter.

In one instance, the official said a cell had been broken up in the oil-rich Eastern Province that was controlled by African immigrants who had been seeking to recruit followers at oil installations.

A message purportedly sent to the cell’s chief by Al Qaeda Number-2 Ayman al-Zawahiri called for militants to collect money and promised to send jihadis from “Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa to attack oil installations and the security forces.

Without giving details, the official said the cell had begun planning an attack on “an oil site and a security target with car bombs.”

Last July, the interior ministry announced that it had started forming special security units to protect the country’s oil infrastructure from terrorist attacks.

In April 2007, the ministry said 172 terror suspects had been rounded up along with weapons and cash. Some of the militants were allegedly plotting airborne attacks on oil facilities and army bases.

Security forces thwarted an alleged Al Qaeda attack against Saudi Arabia’s massive Abqaiq oil processing facility in February 2006. Two members of the security forces and two assailants were killed.—AFP