Juhayman al-Otaybi

On 20 November 1979, the first day of the Islamic year 1400, the Great Mosque of Mecca was seized by a well-organized group of 400 to 500 men under al-Otaybi's leadership. A siege lasted more than two weeks before Saudi special forces broke into the mosque. French special forces provided a special tear gas (CS gas) which prevents aggressiveness and slows down breathing. Juhayman was publicly executed by the Saudi authorities in Mecca on 9 January 1980.

By 1977, ibn Baz had departed to Riyadh and Otaybi became the leader of a faction of young recruits that developed their own—sometimes unorthodox—religious doctrines. When older members of the Jamaa travelled to Medina to confront Otaybi about these developments, the two factions split from each other. Otaybi attacked the elder sheikhs as government sellouts and called his new group al-Ikhwan.

In the late 1970s, he moved to Riyadh, where he drew the attention of the Saudi security forces. He and approximately 100 of his followers were arrested in the summer of 1978 for demonstrating against the monarchy, but were released after ibn Baz questioned them and pronounced them harmless.

Otaybi, upon moving to Medina, joined the local chapter of a Salafi group called Al-Jamaa al-Salafiya al-Muhtasiba (The Salafi group that commands right and forbids wrong), which was founded in the mid-1960s by several of Muhammad Nasiruddin al-Albani's disciples. Many of the group's members and scholars were either of Bedouin descent or non-Saudis residents, and therefore marginalized in the religious establishment. Their activism was at least partially motivated by this marginalization. Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz used his religious stature to arrange fundraising for the group, and Otaybi earned money by buying, repairing and re-selling cars from city auctions.

He served in the Saudi Arabian National Guard from 1955 to 1973. He was thin and 6'2 (188 cm) in height according to his friends in the National Guard. His son, Hathal bin Juhayman al-Otaybi, who works for the National Guard, was promoted to the rank of Colonel in 2018.

Juhayman ibn Muhammad ibn Sayf al-Otaybi (Arabic: جهيمان بن محمد بن سيف العتيبي; ‎16 September 1936 – 9 January 1980), was a Saudi terrorist and soldier who in 1979 led the seizure of the Great Mosque of Mecca, Saudi Arabia's holiest mosque, to protest against the Saudi monarchy.

Juhayman said that his justification for the siege was that the House of Saud had lost its legitimacy through corruption and imitation of the West, an echo of his father's charge in 1921 against former Saudi king Ibn Saud. Unlike earlier anti-monarchist dissidents in the kingdom, Juhayman attacked the Saudi ulama for failing to protest against policies that betrayed Islam, and accused them of accepting the rule of an infidel state and offering loyalty to corrupt rulers "in exchange for honors and riches".