Fayez Nureldine, AFP | Saudi special forces take part in "anti-terrorist" exercises on March 18, 2015 in the desert scrubland of Suwayf, north of Arar city on the Iraqi border

Saudi Arabia has arrested 431 people with suspected links to the Islamic State group and in the process thwarted a wave of suicide bombings that were to target mosques and security forces, the interior ministry announced on Saturday.

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Authorities have "managed over the past few weeks to destroy an organisation made of a cluster of cells, which is linked to the terrorist Daesh organisation", the interior ministry said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State group.

“The number arrested to date is 431, most of them [Saudi] citizens, in addition to participants from other nationalities ... six successive suicide operations which targeted mosques in the Eastern province on every Friday timed with assassinations of security men were thwarted,” a statement posted on the official SPA news agency said.

“Terrorist plots to target a diplomatic mission, security and government facilities in Sharurah province and the assassination of security men were thwarted,” the statement said.

Those arrested include people suspected of involvement in several attacks, including a suicide bombing in May that killed 22 people in the eastern village of al-Qudeeh, the deadliest militant assault in the kingdom in more than a decade. Some of the detained are also suspected of having links to the November killing of eight worshippers in the eastern Saudi village of al-Ahsa and for another attack in late May, when a suicide bomber disguised as a woman blew himself up in the parking lot of a Shiite mosque during Friday prayers, killing four.

Those behind a number of militant websites used in recruiting have also been arrested, the ministry said.

The announcement came days after a car bomb exploded at a checkpoint near the kingdom’s highest security prison on Thursday, killing the driver and wounding two security officials in an attack claimed by Islamic State group.

A string of deadly attacks carried out by followers of the ultra-hardline militant group based in Iraq and Syria has fuelled concerns about a growing threat of militancy in the world's top oil exporter.

With the Islamist group seizing vast areas of neighbouring Iraq over the past year, Saudi Arabia deployed some 30,000 soldiers in July 2014 to boost its border defences after Iraqi troops withdrew from the area.

A suicide bomb attack backed by gunmen killed two Saudi border guards in January, in what one analyst called the Islamic State group's first assault on the Saudi kingdom.

Saudi Arabia branded the Islamic State group a terrorist organisation last year and has joined the US-led coalition targeting it in Syria and Iraq.

Authorities have vowed to punish those responsible for terrorist attacks inside the kingdom, which is governed by an ultra-conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam and is the Arab world's largest economy.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS and AP)



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