Al-Qaeda issues ‘sin’ warning

DUBAI: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has warned Saudi Arabia’s reformist Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over his “sinful projects”, in a bulletin released yesterday.

Prince Mohammed has spearheaded a string of policy changes in ultraconservative Saudi Arabia, including reinstating cinemas and allowing women to drive.

“The new era of Bin Salman replaced mosques with movie theatres,” the Yemenbased jihadist group said in its Madad news bulletin, picked up by the SITE Intelligence Group.

He “substituted books that belonged to the imams... with absurdities of the atheists and secularists from the east and the west and opened the door wide for corruption and moral degradation”, it said.

The Sunni jihadist group AQAP has flourished amid a complex war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia heads a military alliance battling Shia Huthi rebels.

In its statement, AQAP slammed April’s WWE Royal Rumble event in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah, near the Islam’s most holy sites in Mecca.

“[Foreign] disbelieving wrestlers exposed their privates and on most of them was the sign of the cross, in front of a mixed gathering of young Muslim men and women,” it said.

“The corruptors did not stop at that, for every night musical concerts are being announced, as well as movies and circus shows,” SITE quoted it as saying.

AQAP in southern Yemen is the target of a long-running drone campaign by the United States, which regards it as the most dangerous branch of the extremist group.

Yemen’s conflict has left nearly 10,000 people dead.