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Al-Qaeda planned to use a powerful poison in a failed attempt to blow up a Saudi deputy interior minister in 2009, a former militant from the terror network said in reports on Wednesday.
Jaber al-Faifi was quoted as saying by the daily Al-Hayat that "Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had planned to add poison to the 800 grams of explosives" used in the suicide bombing that nearly killed Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.
But AQAP's "military leader in Yemen, Qassim al-Rimi, inadvertently failed" to add the poison which can within seconds kill any person wounded by such an explosion, Faifi said on Saudi television.
Faifi said the explosive device was prepared by Ibrahim al-Asiri, an alleged Saudi bombmaker who figures on most-wanted terror lists in both Yemen and Saudi Arabia and suspected by the United States of being behind two US-bound bomb parcels sent from Yemen in October.
AQAP claimed the August 2009 attack against Prince Mohammed, a royal family member who leads the kingdom's anti-terror fight, only several months after it formed from the merger of Al-Qaeda's Yemeni and Saudi branches.
Faifi, a former Guantanamo detainee who rejoined Al-Qaeda in Yemen after graduating from Saudi Arabia's rehabilitation programme, turned himself in through Yemen's authorities in October 2010.
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