http://www.guardian.co.uk/saudi/story/0,11599,956228,00.html

Saudis feel US wrath over bombs

David Pallister, Owen Bowcott, and Oliver Burkeman in Washington
Thursday May 15, 2003
The Guardian

The Bush administration gave Saudi Arabia a rare public dressing down yesterday, accusing it of ignoring its earlier requests to step up security at the sites of Monday night's bombings, while Saudi intelligence sources admitted that the al-Qaida suicide cell involved in the attacks had been under surveillance for nearly two months.

They knew the identities of the leader of the 15-strong cell and many of its members, they acknowledged, but the police had failed to capture any of them despite two armed encounters this year.

"As soon as we learned of this particular threat information, we contacted the Saudi government," Robert Jordan, the US ambassador to Riyadh, said in an interview with the American TV network CBS.

"We continue to work with the Saudis on this, but they did not, as of the time of this tragic event, provide the additional security we requested."

Requests for increased security had been made on several occasions, he added.

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, denied that any such request had been received, and said it would have been fulfilled if it had been. But he said: "The fact that the terrorism happened is an indication of shortcomings. And we have to learn from our mistakes and seek to improve our performance in this respect."

Fifteen Saudis were involved in the attacks, he said. But with the death toll rising to 34, including nine suspected suicide bombers, he would not say what had happened to the other six.

Saudi officials, releasing information with unprecedented speed, named the cell leader as Khaled Jehani, 29, al-Qaida's chief of operations, wanted by the FBI as a terrorist since the beginning of last year.

He appeared in video footage recovered in Afghanistan in which al-Qaida members deliver what US attorney general, John Ashcroft, called "martyrdom messages".

Mr Jehani can be seen clutching a Kalashnikov and kissing it.

He is reported to have been given his senior post some time after the capture in November last year of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is believed to have played a central role in bombing the USS Cole in 2000.

He is said to come from the Harbi tribe in south-west Saudi Arabia, the same origins as Ayman al-Zawahri, the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Osama bin Laden's chief ideologue. Several of the September 11 hijackers came from the area.

An FBI counter-terrorism team was on its way to Saudi Arabia last night, where it was expected to demand much more cooperation than it received in the case of the bombing of a US barracks in al-Khobar in 1996, when 19 US personnel were killed.

Then, US officials complained that the Saudis were clearly worried about where the inquiry would lead.

Prince Saud insisted that intelligence had been shared properly between Washington and Riyadh before Monday's attacks, and the two governments had set up a committee to stop the attack happening.

The Americans were told of the Saudis' fears, a fact reflected by notices released by the US state department and the British Foreign Office in the first two days of May, warning that a terrorist group might be in the "final stages" of making an attack on western interests.

The Saudi intelligence was based on hard evidence. On March 18 a house in the east of the capital blew up, killing a Saudi inside. Bombs, machine guns, ammunition and explosives were found.

The Saudi interior ministry said in a statement that it had begun a surveillance campaign on individuals connected with the house.

It was at this house - only metres from one of the compounds attacked - that the Saudi police claimed they had foiled a big terrorist attack on May 6. Explosives, guns and ammunition were found, but the suspects escaped in a gunfight.

The Saudi authorities released the pictures and names of 19 suspects - 17 Saudis, including Jehani, a Yemeni, and a Kuwaiti-Canadian of Iraqi origin. Officials said that the cell had 50 to 60 members, recruited by Jehani. The weapons were smuggled in from Yemen.

Last week the Saudi interior minister, Prince Naif, told the Kuwaiti newspaper al-Watan that some of the men involved in the gunfight "received military training in Afghanistan ... a number of them had been detained and then freed, because we found their role was very limited".

By last weekend Saudi and expatriate security personnel should have been on the highest alert.

Four Metropolitan police detectives arrived in Riyadh on Tuesday with to try to establish how many Britons died in the attacks.

One Briton is known to have been killed and there is growing concern that two others are among the fatalities. The Foreign Office said that 15 were injured.