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			 The militant group, which has claimed responsibility for attacks 
			in the kingdom and stepped up operations in neighboring Yemen, 
			singled out the al-Ha'ir and Tarfiya prisons where many al Qaeda and 
			Islamic State supporters have been detained. 
			 
			"The Islamic State always seeks to free prisoners, but we calculate 
			that the ending of the issues of prisoners will not happen except 
			with the eradication of the rule of tyrants, and then destroying 
			their prisons and razing them to the ground," it said in an article 
			posted online on Tuesday. 
			 
			An Islamic State supporter killed himself in a car bomb at a 
			checkpoint outside Ha'ir prison near Riyadh in July. 
			
			  While Islamic State and al Qaeda are rivals who have condemned each 
			other on ideological grounds, they are both united in enmity towards 
			Saudi Arabia, which has declared them terrorist groups and locked up 
			thousands of their supporters. 
			 
			Riyadh's mass execution on Saturday included four Shi'ite Muslims, 
			among them prominent cleric Nimr al-Nimr, a move that heightened 
			sectarian tensions with Shi'ite power Iran. But anamysts say it was 
			mostly meant as a message to militant Sunnis. 
			 
			Islamic State has claimed responsibility for a series of bombings 
			and shootings in Saudi Arabia since Nov. 2014 that have killed more 
			than 50 people, most of them Shi'ites but also more than 15 members 
			of the security forces. 
			 
			
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			Saudi security officials say the group's supporters inside Saudi 
			Arabia mainly act independently, depending on Islamic State for only 
			limited logistical help and advice, making them harder to detect, 
			but also less capable of attacks on well protected targets. 
			 
			Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) threatened in December to 
			"shed the blood of the soldiers of Al Saud" if its members were 
			executed. 
			 
			AQAP is the Yemen-based wing of the global militant movement and was 
			formed by local jihadists and veterans of al Qaeda's earlier 
			uprising in Saudi Arabia from 2003-06, for participation in which 
			most of those executed on Saturday were convicted. 
			 
			(Reporting by Ahmed Tolba in Cairo and Yara Bayoumy in Dubai; 
			Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Catherine Evans and Andrew 
			Heavens) 
			
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