The mother of Wafa, wife of second man in Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Saeed Al-Shehri, has spoken of the details of her daughter's flight to Yemen to join her husband, adding support to her husband's previous claims that Wafa was forced to go in the company of her husband. Umm Faisal, as she is known, spoke to Okaz newspaper Tuesday only days after her husband told the same newspaper that their daughter had been “kidnapped” in his confused account of Wafa's disappearance with her children, citing a telephone call from Yemen in which she told him she had been forced to flee and wished to return to the Kingdom. According to reports, Saeed Al-Shehri is known to have left for Yemen before January, when he made an appearance on the internet alongside Al-Qaeda head Nasser Al-Wuheishi, and has since made no return to the Kingdom. Al-Shehri's name appeared on the Ministry of Interior list of 85 wanted militants published the following month, and Wafa was believed to have joined him in Yemen four weeks later of her own volition. According to her own account, Umm Faisal was visiting her sick mother in March this year at her house in the Al-Naseem district of Riyadh, and upon returning to the house from a shopping trip she was told that Wafa had purportedly gone to visit the grandmother of her daughter Wasayif in the Al-Shafa district in the south of the city, where Wafa would often spend weekends with her three children. Wasayif Al-Ghamdi is Wafa's daughter by her second husband Abdul Rahman Al-Ghamdi, a terrorist who was killed in a confrontation with security authorities in Hada in Taif seven years ago. Her other children are Yousef Al-Qahtani by her first husband and daughter Shadha Al-Shehri by current husband Saeed. “When I called the mother of Abdul Rahman and she said that Wafa hadn't arrived I started to worry,” Umm Faisal said. “A week earlier she had started showing signs of being depressed and was eating very little.” “We started to look for her in hospitals but didn't find her, and I half expected that the security authorities had taken her for something or other given that her husband Saeed Al-Shehri had recently appeared on the internet with some Yemenis and a Saudi from Al-Qaeda threatening to carry out attacks in the Kingdom and in Yemen.” “Two days later, however, she called me to say she and the children were in Yemen, which really worried me, especially as she's a woman,” Umm Faisal said. “She told me that Saeed had appeared at our house in Al-Naseem with a car and told her and the children to go with him.” “She asked me to forgive her for going, and I said I would only forgive her when she returned.” Umm Faisal said that she spoke briefly at the same time to her grandson Abdulillah Al-Shehri, who is also wanted by security authorities, from the same number, a Yemeni mobile telephone connection. “I couldn't understand how a wanted person was able to come from Yemen, park his car outside our house in broad daylight, pick up his wife and the children and then go back to Yemen,” she said. Umm Faisal also revealed that she spoke to her son Yousef, who is also on the list of 85 wanted terrorists, the day before the beginning of Ramadan. “He called to give me Ramadan greetings, and said he was fine and so were Wafa and the children,” Umm Faisal said. “I begged him to come back, but from the way he spoke I understood he didn't intend to.” Wafa's father, Mohammed Al-Jubeiri, previously told Okaz that his daughter was forced into going to Yemen, describing her departure as resembling a kidnapping and that in her telephone call from Yemen she described “pressures' as preventing her from returning. He claimed that Saeed Al-Shehri had laid in wait at the house in Riyadh until Wafa was alone and then took them to Yemen. Reports that she worked for Al-Qaeda under the alias “Umm Hajir Al-Azdi”, Al-Jubeiri said, were “part of games that Al-Qaeda play to exploit the media, to make people think she'd gone to help and follow the deviant group. It's all falsehood and trickery”.
