Khalid Al-Mahdi, Special to Arab News

SANAA, 12 September 2003 — Yemeni police have arrested seven Saudi nationals wanted by the Kingdom on charges of belonging to extremist organizations, official sources said here yesterday.

“We have seven Saudis in custody. They have been arrested in different parts of the country after we received warrants from the Saudi authorities,” a police official told Arab News on condition of anonymity.

The official said there were ongoing contacts between Sanaa and Riyadh to extradite the suspects under a joint security cooperation pact.

The official hailed as “excellent” the level of cooperation between the two countries, saying that cooperation had so far achieved “positive results on the front of combating terrorism, sabotage and smuggling.”

Meanwhile, a Yemeni Interior Ministry source confirmed in remarks published yesterday reports that Yemeni police is holding the Saudi Bandar Abdul Rahman Al-Ghamdi, who is wanted in the Kingdom on security charges.

It was not clear whether Al-Ghamdi was among the seven detainees.

The unidentified source was quoted by the official 26 September weekly as saying that Al-Ghamdi was being quizzed by Yemeni anti-terror police to find out whether he had connections with Yemeni terrorists.

“Al-Ghamdi had fled to Yemen accompanied by his wife and was arrested in the (Red Sea) province of Houdieda,” some 260 kilometers west of the capital Sanaa, the official said without giving dates.

The suspect is reportedly among a group of 19 wanted militants listed in a Saudi warrant issued a week before the May 12 suicide bombings in Riyadh which killed 35 people.

His wife, identified as Nawal Abdullah, gave birth to a daughter last week and is in touch with the Saudi Embassy in Sanaa to arrange her return to the Kingdom, according to police officials.

Sanaa and Riyadh have already swapped a number of suspects, some of them wanted by authorities in both countries on charges of involvement in terror acts.

The most recent security swap was on Aug. 17, when the Kingdom sent to Yemen four terror suspects, among whom were two linked to last year’s bombing of the French oil supertanker, the Limburg, off the coast of Yemen.

Sanaa, in return, handed over to Riyadh two fugitives including a suspected Saudi drug trafficker who had entered Yemen after a jailbreak in Najran in mid-June.

The two neighbors, who share a 1,800-kilometer-long border, have been intensifying joint security efforts in recent years.