Iran Plotting Skyjackings, Embassy Raids, Saudis Say

The Saudi interior minister accused Iran on Tuesday of plotting to hijack Saudi airliners and to mount terrorist attacks on diplomatic missions as part of a campaign to destabilize the Saudi leadership following the bloody riots by Iranian pilgrims in Mecca last month.

Pledging that Saudi Arabia will not hesitate to defend itself, he warned that “any sabotage and any aggression” will be met with a “strong and determined” response.

The interior minister, Prince Nayif ibn Abdulaziz, spoke at a press conference to which journalists from around the world had been invited to hear the Saudi version of the Mecca violence, in which more than 400 people, most of them Iranian pilgrims, were killed in a demonstration at Islam’s holiest shrine.

Nayif indirectly confirmed reports that Saudi Arabia had an agreement with the leaders of the Iranian delegation to this year’s hajj, or pilgrimage, that gave the Iranians at least tacit approval to stage an anti-American demonstration.

But he said that things quickly got out of hand and degenerated into clashes with security forces when the demonstrators tried to surge past the point at which their protest march was to have stopped.

It was clear, he said, that their intent was to enter the holy mosque of Mecca itself, then crowded with throngs of Muslim worshipers, in order to “act out their criminal conspiracy and spoil the pilgrimage as a whole.”

Nayif, blaming the high number of casualties on a stampede in which many of the demonstrators were trampled to death, categorically denied Iranian charges that security forces opened fire on the Iranians, many of whom were armed with sticks and knives.

But he said that if “the situation had deteriorated further, if there had been a real possibility of them invading (the mosque) and killing thousands of Muslims, we would not have hesitated to open fire.”

It did not come to that, he said, because security forces, deployed in large numbers in anticipation of trouble, were able to quell the demonstrators with their batons.

Nayif repeatedly referred to the Iranians as “criminals” and “conspirators” bent on sabotaging the annual pilgrimage in order to undermine the Saudi government and spread Iran’s Islamic revolution throughout the Arab world.

“What they did was not spontaneous and was not unrelated to what was planned for this region and the Muslim world,” he said. “We have heard that Saudi embassies and Saudi planes will now be targets.”

He did not elaborate, nor did he say how Saudi Arabia would respond to such attacks, but he warned they would be met “with extreme firmness.”

The Mecca riots dramatized an ancient split between two major branches of Islam, the Sunni sect to which most of the Muslim world--including the Saudi majority--belongs, and the Shia sect, the fundamentalist faith of Iran and its leadership.

For years, Iranian pilgrims seeking to expand their nation’s Islamic revolution beyond Iran’s borders have used the annual pilgrimage to Mecca as a platform for political demonstrations against the United States, the Soviet Union, Iraq and other countries. Clashes between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi security forces have occurred before, but none on the scale of last month’s riots.

In the past several weeks Saudi Arabia and Iran have been waging an increasingly vitriolic propaganda war over the Mecca incident, an act of sacrilege deeply shocking to the Muslim world.

As the verbal abuse has become more strident, with Iran calling openly for the overthrow of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, the normally reclusive Saudis created expectations of an important announcement by inviting journalists from the United States, Western Europe and throughout the Islamic world to attend Nayif’s press conference.

Nevertheless, Nayif refused to say what specific steps, if any, Saudi Arabia would take toward Iran over the Mecca incident, and the press conference contained little that had not been said before.

Rather, its purpose appeared to be related to what diplomats here believe is an anxiety among members of the ruling family that the Iranian version of the Mecca incident has been more widely disseminated.

Indirectly, it may also have been an attempt to rebut a number of recent accounts in which non-Iranian witnesses say they heard shots being fired during the Mecca melee.

Indeed, while the Saudis have gone to great lengths to deny suggestions that their security forces may have overreacted, a number of diplomats here remain skeptical of their insistence that no guns were used.

“We believe shots were fired,” one source said, adding that his conversations with several pilgrims who were in Mecca at the time make it “difficult to believe otherwise.”

This source said there is strong evidence to indicate that the Iranians had planned a violent confrontation with security forces. He said investigators had established that many of the Iranians bought knives at hardware stores in Jidda, which is near Mecca, before the day of the demonstration.

Beyond the question of blame for the Mecca deaths, the unusual Saudi publicity blitz appears to signal a dramatic change in the Saudis’ tactics for dealing with Iran, several analysts said.

After Mecca, the Saudis seem to have realized that their longstanding policy of trying to appease Tehran, even as they quietly support Iraq in the war against non-Arab Iran, has failed, the analysts said.

This realization was reflected in the opening statement that Nayif read to reporters. The Saudi government, he said, had made a number of “sincere attempts to reason” in the past, but “unfortunately all these serious efforts came to nothing . . . because the Iranian government has misinterpreted the elaborate display of patience by Saudi authorities over the years as a sign of weakness.”

Saudi Arabia’s response, he indicated, will be different in the event of future provocation.

Nayif sidestepped questions about whether Saudi Arabia is considering breaking diplomatic relations with Iran, saying that this is a “political decision” on which it would not be proper for him to comment.

Foreign ministers from the Arab League, meanwhile, voted to give Iran until Sept. 20 to accept a July 20 U.N. Security Council resolution for a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War or face the possibility of a break of relations between Iran and the Arab countries.

According to reports from Tunis, the Tunisian capital, Arab League Secretary General Chedli Klibi told reporters that the breaking of diplomatic relations could not be excluded if Tehran does not respond to peace efforts.

During the Tunis debate, Iran’s two main Arab allies, Syria and Libya, were reported strongly opposed to the proposed resolution.

The United Arab Emirates, which has lucrative trade links with Iran and whose vulnerability was underscored by Iran’s mining of its waters in the Persian Gulf last week, was also said to have “strong reservations” about the resolution.