Saudi Arabia arrests 3 brothers in Kuwait attack

Suspects alleged to have ties to suicide bomber in Shiite mosque attack; fourth brother said to be fighting alongside IS in Syria

Saudi authorities have arrested three brothers in connection with the suicide bomber who detonated himself in a Shiite mosque in Kuwait on June 26, a Saudi official said Monday.

The three brothers were “parties to the crime of the sinful terrorist bombing that targeted the Imam al-Sadeq mosque in Kuwait,” an Interior Ministry spokesperson said according to Reuters, citing official Saudi news agency SPA.

They were not named.

One brother was arrested in Kuwait and was extradited to Saudi Arabia, another was arrested in the city of Taif in the west of the kingdom and the third was held after a gunfight at a house near the Kuwaiti border in which two Saudi policemen were wounded, according to the SPA report.

A fourth brother lives in Syria and is a member of Islamic State, the organization that claimed the bombing in Kuwait.

Twenty-seven people died in the attack in Kuwait, the deadliest terror attack the country ever suffered, and the most lethal in any of the small Arab Gulf states since Saudi Arabia managed to suppress a campaign of al Qaeda bombings in the early 2000s.

The attacker struck the Imam Sadiq Mosque in the residential neighborhood of al-Sawabir in Kuwait’s capital, Kuwait City. It is one of the oldest Shiite mosques in Kuwait, a predominantly Sunni Arab nation where at least at third of the population is believed to be Shiite Muslims. More than 200 were wounded in the attack.

The last massive attack to take place in Kuwait was in 1983, when Iranian-backed Shiite militants from Iraq carried out bombings that killed at least five and wounded nearly 90.

AP contributed to this report.