Terrorists hate Saudis for their freedoms.

The following appears in the New York Times today:

Saudi police arrested 172 Islamic militants today who they said were planning attacks that involved flying airplanes into oil fields.

The Saudi state TV channel Al-Ekhbariah broadcast footage of large weapons cache discovered buried in the desert.
The Saudi Interior Ministry said the militants were planning suicide attacks against public figures, refineries and other oil facilities, and military installations, some of them outside the kingdom; no specific locations were mentioned.

“They had reached an advanced stage of readiness, and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks,” a spokesman for the ministry, Brig. Mansour al-Turki, told the Associated Press in a telephone interview. “They had the personnel, the money, the arms. Almost all the elements for terror attacks were complete except for setting the zero hour for the attacks.”

The ministry statement said that some of the people detained today had traveled to other countries to learn how to fly airplanes, so that they could carry out attacks in Saudi Arabia. There were also plans to storm a Saudi prison and free inmates, the ministry statement said.

More than $32.4 million in cash was seized by police, along with weapons and other items, the ministry said.

If these numbers are correct, this plot was even more ambitious and elaborate than 9/11. Knowing how much terrorist organizations are opposed to the freedoms enjoyed by Americans, Saudi Arabia must be a veritable Amsterdam of hedonism! Yes, nothing evokes free-lovin' feminism like Saudi Arabia. How could we not have seen this coming?

The Guardian Article on the same story adds the following observations.

The ministry did not name the terrorist organisation the suspects allegedly belonged to, referring to it only as a "deviant group", the usual term the Saudi government uses for Islamic terrorists such as al-Qaida.

Saudi state television showed rifles, handguns, magazines and explosives it said had been found buried in the desert. Other footage had investigators breaking tiled floors to uncover more weapons and digging up plastic sacks from the sand.

Saudi Arabia has been battling al-Qaida since the group launched a wave of bombings and shootings in the country in May 2003, including a suicide attack at a housing compound for foreigners in Riyadh that killed 35 people.

Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida's leader, is a Saudi national. He has previously called for attacks on the kingdom's oil facilities.

Watch out, Sweden!