Saudi spy arrested in Syria

A Saudi spy named Nasser al-Ariqi was arrested in Homs after clashes erupted between Syrian forces and armed gangs on Saturday. Al-Ariqi has been said to be the commander of a heavily armed terrorist group in the city in Western Syria. The Lebanese media reports said that the armed group has been trying to remove the Syrian army's security checkpoints using heavy weaponry. The Syrian government has repeatedly accused several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia and Qatar of fueling the unrest in Syria by providing armed gangs in the country with weapons and financial resources to incite civil war and topple the government of President Bashar al-Asad. Syria has been experiencing unrest since mid-March with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country. Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes. The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad. In October, calm was eventually restored in the Arab state after President Bashar al-Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but the US and Israeli plots could spark some new unrests in certain parts of the country. Syrian state television has broadcast reports showing seized weapons caches and confessions by terrorist elements describing how they obtained arms from foreign sources. In confessions broadcast on the Syrian TV in September, a captured terrorist revealed the tactics used by armed terrorist groups to stir tension in Syria and the role played by the foreign elements in Syrian unrests. The terrorist, Ammar Ziyad al-Najjar, confessed that he received foreign aid and instructions from contacts in Saudi Arabia and Jordan to deface Damascus. Al-Najjar stated that he was involved in a group that received instructions on how to kidnap people and blame it on the Syrian government. The man also confessed to, among other crimes, purchasing firearms and distributing them among outlaws. He also recounted how groups of outsiders, many of whom not Syrians, showed up during the attacks on police stations in Hama. Najjar said the men would distribute food and drink to demonstrators, sometimes slipping money into the food to encourage protests and adding stimulant powders at other times. There was another type of pills that made people more aggressive - pills that were given openly to members of the foreign-backed terror squads, he explained.