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 The disclosure of the bomber's nationality is likely to focus the
attention of authorities probing Friday's suicide attack on ties
between Islamists in Kuwait and those in Saudi Arabia, a center of
ultra-conservative Islamic thought.
Kuwait's interior ministry named the bomber as Fahd Suliman
Abdul-Muhsen al-Qabaa and said he flew into Kuwait's airport at dawn
on Friday, only hours before he detonated an explosives-laden vest
at Kuwait City's Imam al-Sadeq mosque.
The Islamic State militant group issued an audio clip purporting to
be a posthumous statement by the bomber, in which he criticizes
Shi'ite Muslims, "especially in Kuwait", for what he terms insulting
Islam.
"Very, very soon you will see something unexpected, expect blood,
expect death," the speaker says. Reuters was unable to verify
immediately the authenticity of the statement.
Saudi Arabia said al-Qabaa was not previously known to security
authorities and had flown out of the kingdom to the Bahraini capital
Manama on Thursday, state news agency SPA quoted the interior
ministry as saying.
 The timing of his arrival suggests he had a network already in place
in Kuwait. The Kuwaiti interior ministry said it was searching for
more partners and aides in this "despicable crime", adding that
Qabaa had been born in 1992.
Islamic State's Saudi Arabian arm claimed responsibility for the
attack on the mosque, where 2,000 worshippers were praying at the
time. It was one of three attacks on three continents that day
apparently linked to hardline Islamists.
The attack was the most significant act of Sunni militant violence
in Kuwait since 2005, when an al Qaeda-linked group calling itself
the Peninsula Lions clashed with security forces in the streets of
Kuwait City. Nine Islamists and four security force members were
killed in the gun battles.
The bombing has sharply heightened regional security concerns
because Islamic State appears to be making good on its threat to
step up attacks in the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
The group, seeking to expand from strongholds in Iraq and Syria,
says its priority target is the Arabian peninsula and in particular
Saudi Arabia, home of Islam's holiest places, from where it plans to
expel Shi'ite Muslims.
Islamic State subscribes to a puritanical school of Sunni Islam that
considers Shi'ites as heretics.
The interior ministry said the driver of the Japanese-made car, who
left the mosque immediately after Friday's bombing, was an illegal
resident named Abdul-Rahman Sabah Aidan.
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"DEVIANT" IDEAS
The ministry, which had earlier reported the vehicle owner's arrest,
said Aidan, 26, was found hiding in one of the houses in the
al-Riqqa residential area.
"Initial investigations showed that the owner of the house is a
supporter of the deviant ideology," it said, employing a term often
used by authorities in the Gulf Arab region to refer to hardline
Islamist militants.
The owner of the house, a Kuwaiti citizen, was also detained, the
ministry said.
Officials said the bombing was clearly meant to stir enmity between
majority Sunnis and minority Shi'ites and harm the comparatively
harmonious ties between the sects in Kuwait.
Shi'ites are between 15 and 30 percent of the population of Kuwait,
where members of both communities live side by side with little
apparent friction.
Kuwait is a conservative Muslim country where alcohol is banned, but
it is less strict than Saudi Arabia on issues such as women's rights
and freedom of religion.
Kuwaitis reacted with outrage to the bombing. Some said citizens who
fund Islamist armed groups fighting in Syria and Iraq were to blame
for any militancy in Kuwait.
Kuwait has been one of the biggest humanitarian donors to Syrian
refugees through the United Nations, but it has also struggled to
control unofficial fund-raising for opposition groups in Syria by
private individuals.
Abdulrahman al-Jeeran, a parliamentarian and member of the
ultra-conservative Salafi branch of Islam, told Reuters lawmakers
should stop "sectarian discourse" and be prevented from using
sectarian issues for electoral gains.
(Additional reporting by Rania el Gamal, Sami Aboudi, Noah Browning
andf Taghreed al-Madani in Dubai; Writing by William Maclean;
Editing by Ralph Boulton and Paul Tait)
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