Ex-Gitmo Detainees Pledge Attack

Five days after President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay within a year, two Saudis who were released from the controversial U.S. prison in 2007 renewed their pledge to attack western interests in a video released by Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula on the internet today.

“We assure our leaders Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, may God protect him, and Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, that we shall continue to follow the path of jihad,” said Abu Sufian al Azdi Saeed al Shihri, a Saudi who was a prisoner at the Guantanamo prison.

“By God, our imprisonment has only made us more resilient and more committed to our principles that we had fought jihad and been taken prisoners for,” added al Shihri, who's now the deputy to the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Al Shihri also claimed in his lengthy speech that Arab governments had sent interrogators to Guantanamo to extract confessions prisoners. He also addressed Muslim prisoners held in U.S. prisons around the world, reassuring them that they are not forgotten, specifically mentioning blind Omar Abdel Rahman, Suleiman el Alwan and Walid al Senani.

Another former Guantanamo prisoner, Abu Hareth Mohammed al Oufi, appears at the end of the tape threatening Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef Bin Abdel Aziz, over the ill treatment of Islamist militants in Saudi prisons and warned against the Kingdom’s rehabilitation program, which he attended alongside his comrade, al Shihri, upon their return from Guantanamo.

He also renewed the threat against western interests in the Arab Peninsula and specifically in Saudi Arabia, assuring that they'll be attacked. “We tell the policemen of the Saud family, the guardians of the Jews and the Crusaders, repent to God what you have been doing by guarding the gates of their embassies, their churches, their compounds, and their military and intelligence headquarters.”

The leader of the group, the Yemeni Abu Bassir Bin Nasser al Weheishy, also appeared on the video and stressed on the importance of cutting supply lines serving U.S. forces present in the Arab Peninsula and on the need to attack westerners and western interests “until America stops its support to the Jews.”

Al Weheishy also assured Palestinians that al Qaeda was coming to their rescue. “We shall move towards our people in Gaza and Palestine, so rejoice O’ people of Jerusalem, the people of the victorious pact are heading your way.”

The fourth man appearing on the tape is the group's military chief Abu Huraira Qassem al Rimi, who was once the link between bin Laden and al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Al Rimi slammed Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah for not “supporting Palestinians” with any of the rockets he claimed could reach Tel Aviv during the recent war on Gaza. “Don’t our brothers in Gaza deserve that you would support them with one, two or three thousands of those rockets?!” al Rimi told said.

All four men appeared sitting next to one another against an al Qaeda flag with weapons scattered around them. They appeared with their faces unmasked, as a sign of defiance to the Saudi and Yemeni security services.

The 19-minute video also includes footage of a large group of gunmen walking through mountain passes and undergoing training at a desert camp. The group had announced in its online magazine released last Wednesday that it had set up a camp to train militants with the aim of sending them to fight in Palestine.

The tape is entitled “From Here We Begin...In Al Aqsa We Shall mMet” and was produced by Malahem, a newly-established media house of al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.