RIYADH - Saudi Arabia cannot confirm the death of the regional al Qaeda wing's deputy leader, Said al-Shehri, which was announced by Yemen on Monday, Interior Minister Prince Ahmed was quoted on Sunday as saying. The report of the death of Shehri, a Saudi national, was greeted by security experts as important in the battle against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) - based in Yemen and seen by Washington and Riyadh as AQAP's most dangerous branch. Prince Ahmed, who was promoted to minister in June after the death of his predecessor and elder brother Crown Prince Nayef, told pan-Arab Asharq al-Awsat: "We have not yet confirmed that the dead man is the one wanted by the Interior Ministry." Although AQAP's leader is Yemeni, many of its other top figures have Saudi nationality and have made the fall of the kingdom's ruling al-Saud family as a high priority. Shehri, like some other AQAP figures, was released from a US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay in 2007 and then went through a Saudi rehabilitation programme run by the Interior Ministry. Militants carried out a series of attacks between 2003 and 2006 on government and foreign targets in the country and some those are now working with AQAP. They have not managed to carry out a successful operation inside Saudi Arabia for six years. In 2010 they attempted to kill the Assistant Interior Minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the head of security for the world's top oil exporter, when a would-be defector from AQAP detonated a bomb at a meeting.
