Authorities in Guinea have arrested a number of people accused of involvement in the assassination of Saudi preacher Abdul Muhsin Al-Tuwaijri on Thursday in a remote border area between Guinea and Mali.
Tuwaijri was taken to the capital Conakry in preparation for his body to be transferred to Saudi Arabia.
Security sources confirmed that unidentified gunmen ambushed the Saudi preacher when he was on a motorcycle accompanied by a local resident.
The Saudi preacher died at on the scene of the attack, security and medical sources confirmed that he received two bullets to the chest, resulting in his immediate death.
Tuwaijri was a member of a mission building mosques in Upper Guinea and was killed in the village of Kantebalandougou, between the towns Kankan and Kerouane.
He was “shot twice in the chest while riding a motorcycle with a villager on the way to get his car,” a security source told AFP.
“The Saudi died at the scene while his companion, who owned the motorcycle, was seriously injured and taken to a hospital in Kankan,” said a medical source.
A group of traditional huntsmen are accused of standing behind the assassination which took place after a prayer speech that was not to their liking, and who embrace the old faith-based African religions.
Guinean civil society organizations have already sounded the alarm over Iran's attempt to create its own influence in Guinea under a sectarian guise. It is focused on strengthening Iranian political messages.
However, official authorities remain silent over such warnings.
The role played by Iranian embassies in the West African region is to create religious influence with a parallel political agenda that has become evident in many African countries, including Niger, Ivory Coast and Guinea.
West Africa has been under growing security tensions for several years because of attacks staged by local armed terrorist groups, while government armies are unable curb threats imposed by such groups because of lack of training and weak military capabilities.
Earlier, two Kuwaiti preachers who were on a mission in the state of Burkina Faso last August were also killed during an attack believed to be carried out by al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, killing 18 people in a Turkish restaurant in the center of the capital Ouagadougou .
