Major General Mansour Al-Turki, spokesman for the Ministry of Interior, has revealed that some members of deviant groups had tried to recruit his son, but that his prompt intervention prevented this from happening. Al-Turki made these frank comments while addressing a symposium on terrorism and drugs organized by the Teachers' College in Riyadh on Monday. In light of this experience, Al-Turki called on teachers to care for their students and to protect them from ideologies which have nothing to do with Islam. He said he had waited 10 years for a child and Allah finally blessed him with a son. He said his son started asking him “strange questions”. If I had not intervened, I would have found that my son was killed, or in Iraq or Somalia”. He called on families to look after their children and to watch their friends. He also urged the social and education institutions to monitor the attitude of their students and correct any misconceptions instilled in their minds. Citing an example, he said a citizen, who voluntarily turned himself recently, had been lured to some troubled areas where he stayed for more than 40 days. The citizen only later found out that he had been deceived by deviant groups of people. He then asked to return to the country and surrendered to the authorities. “Last year the security authorities foiled several attempts by the advocates of deviant thought to sneak into the Kingdom to carry out their vicious plans, to smuggle brainwashed youth out of the Kingdom and to train them for terrorist operations.” He said the terrorists have failed to create chaos in the Kingdom and stressed that Al-Qaeda was involved in these plans to recruit youth for their criminal acts. He also exposed plots by some countries to damage the image of the Kingdom by trying to create the impression that Saudis are terrorists who belong to Al-Qaeda. He said the Ministry of Interior has been determined to identify all the ideological dimensions of the problem. It has been able to develop a strategy around intellectual security which has been presented to the Arab ministers of interior. Meanwhile, Abdullah Bin Muhammad Al-Shareef, the Assistant Public Security Director General for Preventative Affairs at the Anti-Narcotic Administration, said the Kingdom is being targeted by drug traffickers as can be seen by the huge amounts seized by the security authorities. In 2006, the security men foiled an attempt to smuggling 62 million pills of Captagon and 21 kilograms of pure heroin.
