The eighteenth of June 2004 was a defining day for the security services in Saudi Arabia. Not because it contains a memory of an occasion, but because it would have imposed itself on the lists and records of history, under the heading of the day that witnessed “the killing of the fourth leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” the mortal Abdel Aziz Al-Muqrin.
And this importance is not acquired from his person, as he is less than that and less, but the event of his killing was a message to society and the Saudi street, that the state is determined to liquidate these fragmented deviants of horizons, who terrorized the safe and killed the innocent, in a scene that the Saudis are not accustomed to, not in terms of The government, not the people, and another message to Al Qaeda, stating that we are on the lookout for you.
And the killing of Al-Muqrin, who, at the time of his leadership of the defunct organization, witnessed the planning of what was called in their dictionaries as “Operation Volcano”, for which 6 booby-trapped cars were prepared to carry out, targeting the Al-Sefarat neighborhood, which is one of the neighborhoods of the capital, Riyadh, which hosts most of the world’s embassies in the Kingdom. A resounding blow to Al-Qaeda, with the loss of one of its fiercest fighters, according to what its terrorist circles describe.
Al-Muqrin was known for his disagreement with the al-Halak cell, “Turki al-Dandani”, and the two parties disagreed about carrying out the “residential complex bombings” east of Riyadh on May 12, 2003, because the first – that is, al-Muqrin – needed some time to be able to recruit more individuals, However, he was struck by the inclination of the organization’s leader at the time, “Khaled al-Hajj”, to the al-Dandani theory, which wanted to accelerate the carrying out of simultaneous bombings.
With time, differences spread among the companions of the deviant terrorist ideology, and Al-Muqrin dissented from the internal leaders of the organization, and installed himself as a leader. The leadership initiative over Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula – as it was called during that period -.
On the eighth of June 2004, the alleys and roads of Riyadh were in a state of calm, as a result of everyone watching a football match at King Fahd International Stadium – east of Riyadh, which brought together the two most important football teams in the capital, and as a final match for the cup, attended by the government, led by The late King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Minister of Interior, Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, and King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who was the governor of the Riyadh region at the time.
--At this time, the security services were following a vehicle, in which Abdulaziz Al-Muqrin was seen, in one of the streets of Al-Malaz neighborhood – in the center of the capital -, and they were about to follow it, and it became clear that the person accompanying him in it was Faisal Al-Dakhil, who is wanted by the security forces, and two other people.
They continued to be monitored, and as soon as the security men positioned themselves to surround the site and monitor the car, they opened fire, and they found no choice but to kill him immediately, in a security operation that did not take a full minute, to match his little person.
Thus, al-Qaeda’s plan was hit with a complete failure, after it tried to make more efforts to turn it – that is, al-Muqrin – into a “terrorist myth”, through which it would acquire a grand image, through which it would be able to attract the largest number of simple and gullible people, according to the logic of leading the collective mind of these empty people.
With this liquidation, the state will have taken revenge for the victims of the bombing of the Traffic Department building in Riyadh, and those who fell victim to a series of sabotage acts, storming residential complexes and companies, in order to carry out kidnappings of foreigners, through which the organization sought to put the Kingdom in an embarrassing corner in front of public opinion. Global.
But his plans failed, and he played a heroic role in the leadership of this extremist body – i.e. al-Qaeda -. Rather, it did not take less than a few minutes for the heroes of the security apparatus to see the legend of “Al-Muqrin” fall, his “ideology” to end, and he loses his intellectual bets, at a “gas station”. “.
