Al-Muqrin … A terrorist with a Qatari passport

Nasr Abdo

Qatar insists to sponsor terrorism and offer backing to it. This comes at a time the region teems with conspiracies aiming at destroying its states.

Doha refuses to suspend its support to terrorism, even as four Arab states, namely Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain try to convince it to start a reconsideration of its policies.

A large number of international institutions and agencies have also been pinpointing Qatar’s sponsorship of terrorism.

Qatar has given its nationality to a large number of terrorists. It also backs those returning from the battlefields in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Somalia. The same war returnees were denied entry to the four states boycotting Qatar, widely known as the “Anti-Terrorism Quartet”.

Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin is one of the terrorists who have a Qatari passport they used in travelling everywhere and staging terrorist attacks.

Al-Muqrin was involved in attacks in Saudi Arabia before he was killed in Saudi capital, Riyadh.

Originally a Saudi national, al-Muqrin was born in 1974. He was the leader of the al-Qaeda group in Saudi Arabia for three months. These three months were the most bloody in the history of the branch of the terrorist organization in Saudi Arabia. He was, however, killed on June 18th, 2004.

Al-Muqrin belonged to a middle-class Saudi family.  He did not attend secondary school to the end. After leaving school, he travelled to Afghanistan where he joined Jihadist training camps. In 1990, al-Muqrin travelled to Bosnia and Herzegovina. He took part in the smuggling of arms from Spain to Algeria, before he returned to his home country in 2004. Nonetheless, he entered Saudi Arabia with a Qatari passport.

Al-Muqrin’s name was associated with the most violent terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel Jubeir, said al-Muqrin would never have succeeded in entering Saudi Arabia if he did not have the passport of Qatar.

Qatar, he said, gives its passport to terrorists to enter Saudi Arabia to stage attacks in it.

Al-Muqrin was involved in a number of terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, including the bombing of the Traffic Department headquarters in Riyadh in 2004. In May, 2004, he staged a terrorist attack in the western Saudi city of Yanbu.

Three weeks later, al-Qaeda killed a German national in al-Hamra district in Saudi Arabia’s eastern city of Dammam. A few days later, al-Muqrin and al-Qaeda staged three attacks that left more than 20 people dead. On June 12th, 2004, al-Qaeda killed a US national and kidnapped another.

Al-Muqrin was then killed together with other terrorists at a petrol station in Riyadh.

He is yet a new evidence of Qatar’s support to terrorism. The Gulf statelet offers support to terrorists, including giving them its nationality, with the aim of destabilizing neighboring states in the Arab Gulf.