RIYADH, July 8: Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti on Friday strongly condemned the deadly blasts that rocked London and are believed to be the work of Al Qaeda, saying Islam strictly prohibits the slaughter of innocent people.

The explosions that ripped through central London’s transport system on Thursday, “targeting peaceable people, are not condoned by Islam, and are indeed prohibited by our religion,” Sheikh Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said in a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.

“Attributing to Islam acts of individual or collective killings, bombings, destruction of properties and the terrorizing of peaceable people is unfair, because they are alien to the religion,” said Sheikh, who heads the Council of Senior Ulema, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority.

Sheikh said “respectable Muslim scholars” had stated that such outrages bear no relation to Islam. He urged fellow clerics to “repeat this and make it clear so that those who strayed from God’s right path heed (their directives) and the world realizes that these crimes bear no relation to God’s religion.”

In a separate statement, Sheikh similarly condemned the abduction and murder of Egypt’s top diplomat in Iraq, which was also claimed on Thursday by the group of Al Qaeda’s front man in that country, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

—AFP