Riyadh: Al Qaeda planned to use a
powerful poison in a failed attempt to blow up a Saudi deputy
interior minister in 2009, a former militant from the terror
network said in reports on Wednesday.
Jaber al-Faifi was quoted as saying by the daily
Al-Hayat that "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had planned
to add poison to the 800 grams of explosives" used in the
suicide bombing that nearly killed Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.
But AQAP`s "military leader in Yemen, Qassim al-Rimi,
inadvertently failed" to add the poison which can within
seconds kill any person wounded by such an explosion, Faifi
said on Saudi television.
Faifi said the explosive device was prepared by
Ibrahim al-Asiri, an alleged Saudi bomb maker who figures on
most-wanted terror lists in both Yemen and Saudi Arabia and
suspected by the United States of being behind two US-bound
bomb parcels sent from Yemen in October.
AQAP claimed the August 2009 attack against Prince
Mohammed, a royal family member who leads the kingdom`s
anti-terror fight, only several months after it formed from
the merger of al Qaeda`s Yemeni and Saudi branches.
Faifi, a former Guantanamo detainee who rejoined
al Qaeda in Yemen after graduating from Saudi Arabia`s
rehabilitation programme, turned himself in through Yemen`s
authorities in October 2010.
PTI
