A suicide bomber killed 21 worshippers on Friday in a packed Shi’ite mosque in eastern Saudi Arabia, residents and the health minister said, the first attack in the kingdom to be claimed by Islamic State militants.
Islamic State said in a statement that one of its suicide bombers, identified as Abu ‘Ammar al-Najdi, carried out the attack using an explosives-laden belt that killed or wounded 250 people, US-based monitoring group SITE said on its Twitter account. It said it would not rest until Shi’ites, which it views as heretics, are driven from the Arabian peninsula.
It was one of the deadliest assaults in recent years in the largest Gulf Arab country, where sectarian tensions have been aggravated by nearly two months of Saudi-led air strikes on Shi’ite Houthi rebels in neighbouring Yemen.
More than 150 people were praying when the huge explosion ripped through the Imam Ali mosque in the village of al-Qadeeh, witnesses said.
A video posted online showed a hall filled with smoke and dust, with bloodied people moaning with pain as they lay on the floor littered with concrete and glass. More than 90 people were wounded, the Saudi health minister told state television.
“We were doing the first part of the prayers when we heard the blast,” worshipper Kamal Jaafar Hassan told Reuters by phone from the scene.
