Saudi: Terror Suspects Trained to Use Planes

April 28, 2007 — -- Inside Saudi Arabia today, state run TV was showing the public what it usually shows them, a long series of handshakes and photo ops among dignitaries. It all looked like business as usual.

But, in a striking new development, the high-ranking Interior Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, said that some of the 172 suspects arrested anti-terror raids announced Friday had trained to use civilian aircraft in suicide missions.

"They were ready to go," al-Turki told ABC News, adding that he had no details as to when the alleged plot was to have been carried out.

Al-Turki told The Associated Press that the militants planned to use the planes "like car bombs … to use the aircraft as a tool to carry out suicide operations."

He said the targets also included Saudi military bases, which he said the militants had no other way of reaching but "through these means" of blowing up an aircraft.

The Saudis have offered few further details, and there is no confirmation as to what type of "commercial" aircraft might have been involved, whether a big passenger plane or a tiny light aircraft packed with explosives. But the mere possibility that large passenger planes might have factored in a potential suicide mission, has prompted many to compare it to the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States.

"This was going to be an attack on much larger scale then 9/11," Alexis Debat, senior fellow for national security and terrorism at the Nixon Center in Washington, told ABC News, "because the attack on oil facilities essentially strike at every one of us."

Also today, for the first time since the terror arrests were announced, the Saudi government suggested that al Qaeda was behind it all. Al-Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the group of 172 Islamic extremists "are carriers of al Qaeda ideology, working on achieving al Qaeda goals, which is to take over the society."

It is rare that Saudi Arabia ever mentions al Qaeda by name, in part because Bin Laden himself is a Saudi. Al Qaeda is usually referred to only as a "deviant group" by the Saudi government.

Today, the Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman also warned that some of the terror suspects had trained in al Qaeda-style camps abroad.

"It could be Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan," al-Turki said. "There are so many troubled regions in the world."

Debat told ABC News: "The lesson of this operation is that Al Qaeda is richer, it's bolder, it's more skilled, and it is in Iraq. And Iraq has emerged as a factory of jihadism, as a factory turning out hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives with far deadlier skills."

Those seven terror cells were apparently taking shape inside the kingdom last year, even as the Saudis showed off their anti-terror training program and bragged that the kingdom was secure.

But today, in the wake of the latest plot, a high-ranking member of the Saudi Royal family said that a the danger is far from over