SAUDI ARABIA: Saudi Arabia's highest-ranking cleric said yesterday that those behind the suicide car-bombing in Riyadh on Wednesday would "burn in hell" for killing innocent Muslims in the attack, which the Al Haramain Brigades, a militant Islamist group linked to al-Qaeda, has said it carried out.
The explosion destroyed a headquarters building of the Saudi security forces.
The Saudi state news agency said that a security officer later died of his wounds yesterday, raising the official death toll to five, with 148 injured.
Doctors had reported earlier that 10 people were killed in the explosion.
Diplomats in the Saudi capital said that they had heard conflicting estimates of the number of dead and injured. There have been no reports of arrests since the attack.
"God has promised wrath, damnation, painful torture and an eternity burning in hell for he who deliberately kills a Muslim . . . Unjustly killing a Muslim is the gravest crime . . . which cannot be atoned," said the kingdom's highest religious authority, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah al-Sheikh.
"I tell all Muslims that this act is a sin, it is one of the greatest sins," he said in a statement. "Aiding, calling for or facilitating the murder of a Muslim is tantamount to involvement in murder, and all who do so will be thrown by God into the flames of hell, for so dear is the sanctity of Muslim blood," he added. - (Reuters)