CAIRO (New York Times) — Saudi Arabia said Wednesday that its security forces had arrested 113 militants with ties to Al Qaeda who had been planning attacks against oil operations and security facilities in the eastern part of the kingdom.

Gen. Mansour al-Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, said the arrests were conducted over the last five months and were aimed at three independent militant groups linked to the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, which has been implicated in numerous attacks across the region, as well as a failed attempt on Dec. 25 to bring down a commercial flight over Detroit.
Officials said most of the suspects had been captured near Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen, and said they had seized weapons and ammunition, as well as cameras, prepaid phone cards and computers. They did not specify which Saudi facilities were potential targets of an attack, or say more precisely when the suspects had been arrested.
“This is a job that has been done in five months,” General Turki said in a telephone interview. “We usually can’t announce it until we make sure we deal with others related to this organization. We announce it after we make sure that we got everybody. This is part of our job, to combat Al Qaeda.”
He said the arrests were precipitated by a confrontation in which Saudi security forces killed two militants who had been on a wanted list. Security forces found four explosive belts in the men’s possession, “which indicated there were more people involved with them,” General Turki said.
General Turki said that most of those arrested were from Saudi Arabia or Yemen, and that Saudi forces had arrested one person from Bangladesh, one from Somalia and one from Eritrea, which lies just across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula.
The authorities did not provide further information about interactions among the three militant groups or their suspected ties to Al Qaeda.
Saudi Arabia from time to time announces the arrests of dozens of suspected militants as it tries to thwart terrorism within its borders. The country rounded up 207 suspected militants said to have Qaeda ties in late 2007, and announced the arrest of 11 others last April.