RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – Islamic militants used police uniforms and cars provided by collaborators among the Saudi security forces to erect a phony traffic checkpoint and kidnap an American engineer, according to an account posted on a militant Islamic Web site on Sunday.
Paul Johnson, the engineer and longtime Saudi resident, was beheaded Friday. The notion that security agents aided in his kidnapping stirred lingering suspicions among diplomats and analysts here that Islamic insurgents have penetrated Saudi government agencies.
“We’ve been concerned about that for some time; we’ve always assumed there has been leakage,” said a Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But then you have to figure out which units. There’s no way of telling how deep it goes.”
Saudi officials staunchly deny that the government has been infiltrated by what the Islamic Web site called “cooperators who are true to their religion in the security apparatus.”
“I think that’s in the realm of fiction,” Adel al-Jubeir, a senior adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, told CNN on Sunday. “The notion that our security services are infiltrated by the terrorists really doesn’t hold. If that were the case, they would not be going after soft targets, they would be going after government installations.”
Police uniforms are easy to buy, Jubeir pointed out.
The radicals’ account of the kidnapping appeared in Voice of the Jihad, an online magazine published by the group calling itself al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, the organization’s leader, was gunned down by security forces Friday, the same day the militants announced they had killed Johnson.
On Sunday, some Saudi sources were already identifying Muqrin’s purported successor: a close friend of his named Saleh Awfi. Believed to be in his early 30s, Awfi is described as a high school dropout and a former jailer who worked for the Saudi government before heading off to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan.
However, the militant organization did not announce Awfi’s ascension.
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