Saudi Internal Security Rachets Up Tension

Saudi police on high alert
Saudi police take precaution and put up checkpoints following violence that took place in east of the country.
26 Nov 2011 – AlJazeera

Saudi police have taken extra precaution and are on high alert following violence that took place in the east of the country.

Saudi police put up checkpoints around the town of Qatif on Friday, after two people were killed and six others were wounded on Wednesday in an exchange of gunfire between security forces and what the Saudi interior ministry called criminals serving a foreign power.

Slogans condemning the royal family have appeared on walls throughout the Qatif.

Wednesday’s deaths brought the toll to four people dead, with nine others wounded, since unrest erupted in in the region last week.

“These casualties have occurred due to the exchange of gunfire with unknown criminal elements who have infiltrated among citizens, and are firing from residential areas and narrow streets,” the interior ministry said on Thursday.

The ministry denied that Shias had been killed by bullets fired by police in Qatif, an administrative unit of the province where a large Shia Muslim community resides.

Echoing language it used after an attack on a police station in the Eastern Province last month, the ministry said: “The goal of those who provoke unrest is to achieve dubious aims dictated to them by their foreign masters.”

The previous references to foreign meddling have been widely interpreted as Shia-dominated Iran, the Sunni-led kingdom’s rival for influence in the Gulf.

Sunni Arab monarchies in the region saw Iran as the force behind unrest earlier this year in majority Shia Bahrain.

Iran has denied repeated accusations that it is trying to destabilise Bahrain.

It has also dismissed an alleged plot that US authorities said last month had implicated Iran’s security agencies in a plan to kill the Saudi ambassador in Washington. …more