Driven by radical beliefs, twin brothers allegedly killed their mother in Saudi Arabia after she tried to stop them from joining Islamic State in Syria in a case that outraged Saudi Arabians worried about rising Islamic militancy.
The June 24 killing, in a country where respect for elders is seen as a bedrock of society, whipped up a storm of debate over the possible influence of a mediaeval Islamic scholar revered as a forerunner of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi school of Sunni Islam.
Saudi interior ministry spokesman General Mansour al-Turki said the pair were suspects in the killing.
"The only thing (we have established) is that they (the twins) follow Takfiri ideology," Turki told Reuters, using a phrase which Saudi authorities use to refer to Islamist militancy. "The case is still under investigation," said the spokesman, who declined to give further details.
Reporters was unable to contact the 20-year-old twins, or their lawyers or family members, and could not independently confirm if the alleged killing was influenced by Islamic State or religious ideology or what the mother actually said.
In a statement after the attack, the interior ministry said that the twins, Khaled and Saleh al-Oraini, were arrested on suspicion of stabbing their 67-year-old mother Haila, their 73-year-old father and their 22-year-old brother at the family home in the capital Riyadh.
The mother, who died of her wounds, had objected to her sons joining Islamic State jihadists in Syria, Saudi media reported.
The father and brother were in hospital in a serious condition, while the alleged attackers were arrested trying to flee across the border to Yemen, media said. Reuters was unable to confirm the status of family members or the whereabouts of the suspects.
"Had this come from drug addicts or ignorant youth, it would not have been unusual," Saudi writer Mohammad Ali al-Mahmoud told Reuters. "The shock is that it came from a pair of religious children acting in the name of Islam."
This is the fifth killing of family members by suspected militants in Saudi Arabia since July last year, the online Saudi news website akhbaar24 reported on June 26.
There have been similar cases of other killings of close relatives by Islamic state members, including a widely reported incident in January in which a suspected militant killed his mother in public in the Syrian city of Raqqa because she had encouraged him to leave the group.
The killings compounded fears of radicalistion in the kingdom. On Monday, suicide bombers struck three cities in an apparently coordinated campaign of attacks as Saudis prepared to break their daily fast observed during the holy month of Ramadan, killing at least four security personnel and themselves.
IMPASSIONED DEBATE
The case has caused impassioned debate because Islam teaches that devotion to caring for elders is a pathway to heaven.
Some scholars and media commentators have asked if it was the teachings of Ibn Taymiyya, a 13th century Islamic scholar from Damascus known for his fatwas (religious opinion) about takfir that were behind young militants killing family members they regarded as apostates.
Islamic State embraces the concept of takfir, often quoting Ibn Taymiyya to exhort its followers to kill other Muslims seen as apostates, including relatives. The word takfir is derived from the Arabic word kafer, which means unbeliever.
It was Ibn Taymiyya who inspired the founder of Wahhabism, the 18th century Sheikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul-Wahhab. Wahhabism, the religious movement espoused by rulers of Saudi Arabia, demands rigid adherence to what it sees as Islam's original practices and a rejection of more modern ideas.
These links, as well as shared practices such as the use of beheading as a means of execution, led some Western commentators to accuse Riyadh of sympathy with groups like Islamic State which holds territory in Iraq and Syria.
However, Western-allied Riyadh says Ibn Abdul-Wahhab was a reformer. The Saudi government rejects any talk of links between his message and that of modern jihadists, denouncing Islamic State and al Qaeda as terrorists and religious heretics.
But Riyadh's official stance has not prevented scholars and commentators from seizing on the latest killing to dissect the degree to which Ibn Taymiyya is responsible for motivating today's jihadists.
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