A top security official from the Ministry of Interior has said that authorities in the Kingdom have received no official information from their Iraqi counterparts on the detention in Basra on Saturday of a Saudi man thought to be a major Al-Qaeda figure. Maj. Gen. Mansour Al-Turki, spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, said that the ministry had not received any official information on the detention nor the identity of the individual. An unnamed official at Basra Operations Command announced on Saturday that Saudi citizen Ihsan Mi'jim, the “Emir of Al-Qaeda in southern Iraq”, and three Iraqi companions were arrested during a raid in Abil Khasseeb in the south of Basra. The four were reportedly taken to Baghdad for investigation. Iraq has handed over to the Kingdom no militants detained within its borders other than three Saudis in September 2008, while the Kingdom has handed back to Iraq 16 Iraqi detainees. Saudis have topped the list of foreign fighters entering Iraq through Iranian and Syrian borders, according to Iraqi testimonies, but doubt has been thrown on the figure since the discovery by security authorities in the Kingdom that Saudis handed back by the Iraqi National Security Adviser during his visit to Riyadh in March 2008 belonged in reality to other Arab countries, among them Yemen. Mustafa Al-'Ani, Deputy Director of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai, has called on Iraqi authorities to disclose the identities and publish photographs of the Saudis it detains. Al-'Ani, speaking to Okaz newspaper, disclosed the existence of a pro-Iranian group in the Iraqi leadership and said blaming countries such as the Kingdom in order to threaten stability in Iraq was in that group's interest. Al-'Ani said the Kingdom needed to use the media to stress that reports from Iraq were inaccurate, particularly with regard to the identification of detainees.
