Police in Riyadh say that they have arrested Islamic militants who were being trained as pilots to fly suicide attacks on Saudi Arabia’s oil fields.

The Saudi interior ministry issued a statement saying that the 172 detainees held in raids today were involved in plots to carry out suicide atttacks against “public figures, oil facilities, refineries ... and military zones". Some of the planned targets were outside the Saudi kingdom.

“They had reached an advance stage of readiness and what remained only was to set the zero hour for their attacks,” Brigadier Mansour al-Turki, an interior ministry spokesman, told the Associated Press news agency.

“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 did not say that the militants would fly aircraft into oil refineries, as the 9/11 hijackers flew planes into buildings in New York and Washington, but it said in a statement that some detainees had been “sent to other countries to study flying in preparation for using them to carry out terrorist attacks inside the kingdom”.

The militants also planned to storm Saudi prisons to free the inmates, the statement said.

In their crackdown, the police seized large quantities of weapons, explosives and money. More than 120 million riyals (US$32.4 million) had been seized in the operation, one of the largest sweeps against terror cells in the kingdom.

The ministry did not name the terrorist group that the militants allegedly belonged to. It referred to them only as a “deviant group" - the Saudi term for Islamic terrorist.

Brigadier al-Turki told the privately-owned Al-Arabiya TV channel that the militants included non-Saudis.

Al-Ekhbariah, the Saudi state TV channel, broadcast footage of a large quantity of weapons discovered buried in the desert. The arms included AK-47 rifles and ammunition, other rifles and handguns, and bricks of plastic explosives, all wrapped in plastic sheeting.

Al-Ekhbariah showed investigators breaking tiled floors with hammers to uncover pipes that contained weapons. In one scene, an official upends a plastic pipe and bullets and little packets of plastic explosives spill out.

The channel also showed investigators digging up plastic sacks in the desert.

The al-Qaeda terror group, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, is a Saudi, has called for attacks on the kingdom’s oil facilities as a means of crippling both the kingdom’s economy and the hurting the West, whom he accuses of paying too little for Arab oil.

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