Qatar stoking dissent via Twitter: Saudi minister

Paris : Saudi Arabia yesterday accused Doha of being behind over 23,000 Twitter accounts it blames for trying to stoke dissent in Saudi Arabia.

“We found over 23,000 Twitter accounts driven by Qatar, some of them linked to accounts calling for ‘revolution’ in Saudi Arabia,” Information Minister Awwad Saleh Al-Awwad told AFP during a visit to Paris.

They included the @mujtahidd account, which claims to have the inside track on the Saudi royal household and has over 1.8 million followers, he said.

Al-Awwad accused a London-based Saudi dissident, Saad al-Faqih, of being behind the account, “together with Qatar”.

While some of @mujtahidd’s claims have proven false, it reported the death of Saudi King Abdullah in 2015, a few hours before the news was officially announced.

Some of the other accounts identified by Riyadh as being Qatari proxies were behind calls for protests by the jobless on April 21, he said. 

In the end, there were no major demonstrations in Qatar, with police flooding the capital.

Further calls for protests during Ramadan also went largely unheeded.

“They failed,” al-Awwad declared.

His remarks came as Saudi Arabia vowed to push on with its month-old boycott of Qatar after the emirate refused to meet a list of demands to end the diplomatic crisis. 

The demands included Doha government  ending  support for the  Muslim   Brotherhood and  closing  its  flagship broadcaster  Al-Jazeera.