Senior Saudi Prince boasting: "We have no al-Qaeda sleeper cells in this country; if we did we would have woken them up long ago"

".... So why the Saudi connection when AQAP is supposed to be anchored in Yemen? The answer is that much of the brains of that organisation come from fanatical yet well-educated young Saudi jihadists who have slipped across the semi-porous Saudi-Yemeni border to escape the security crackdown in their own country to join AQAP in its remote hideouts in Yemen's Shabwa, Marib and Abyan provinces. Saudi intelligence keeps elaborate files on each of these departed militants, knowing that their prime target is the Saudi government itself, its leading princes, its security officials and sometimes its oil infrastructure. 

Before the 2003 triple suicide bombings by AQAP in Riyadh - which killed more than 30 people - Saudi intelligence had a poor handle on what al-Qaeda was up to and what it was capable of. Saudi Arabia's counter-terrorism campaign has made it difficult for al-Qaeda to operate there A leading prince even boasted that "we have no al-Qaeda sleeper cells in this country; if we did we would have woken them up long ago". He was in for a rude surprise...... Others believe the Saudis have been lenient to the point of being gullible, releasing dangerous jihadists onto the streets who go straight on to join or rejoin al-Qaeda. Either way, the effect of the Saudi intelligence-driven counter-terrorism campaign has been to make Saudi Arabia a difficult country for al-Qaeda to operate in. Hence the merging, in January 2009, of the Saudi and Yemeni branches into a small but rejuvenated and clearly dangerous entity - the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula"