A suicide bomber who carried out a deadly attack claimed by the Islamic State group on a Shia mosque in Kuwait was a Saudi national, the interior ministry said Sunday.
In a statement carried by the official KUNA news agency, the ministry identified the attacker as Fahd Suleiman Abdulmohsen al-Qaba’a.
IS claimed the Friday attack, which killed 27 and wounded 227 worshippers at the Imam Sadiq (PBUH) Mosque in Kuwait City, AFP reported.
Authorities also detained the owner of a house used as a hideout by the bomber, a Kuwaiti national who subscribes to “extremist and deviant ideology,” the ministry said.
The suicide attack was the first bombing of a mosque in the oil-rich Persian Gulf country.
This is while the IS-affiliated group in Saudi Arabia, calling itself Najd Province, said militant Abu Suleiman al-Muwahhid carried out the bombing.
The driver, named as Abdulrahman Sabah Eidan Saud, was described as an “illegal resident” born in 1989, who took the bomber to the mosque on Friday.
The driver had been hiding in a house in the Rigga area in the city’s southern Al-Ahmadi Governorate.
Although IS named the alleged perpetrator, authorities had initially been unable to identify him from remains found at the scene, according to Al-Anbaa daily.
Samples of the body were sent to neighboring countries for DNA tests as no records of his were found in Kuwait, the paper said.
Authorities will “continue efforts to uncover the conspirators in this criminal act and to reveal all of the information and circumstances behind it,” the interior ministry said.
