The Bush administration gave Saudi Arabia a rare public dressing down yesterday, accusing it of ignoring earlier requests to step up security at the sites of Monday night’s bombings, while Saudi intelligence sources admitted that the al-Qaeda 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 police had failed to capture any of them despite two armed encounters with the group 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 acknowledged that ”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, moving to release information with unprecedented speed, named the cell leader as Khaled Jehani, who left Saudi Arabia when he was 18 to fight in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan.
Jehani, now 29, became al-Qaeda’s Gulf operations chief after the capture by the US last November of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, suspected of being instrumental in planning the attack on the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000.
Jehani has been on the FBI’s list of al-Qaeda suspects since January 2002. He was one of five who recorded ”martyrdom” videotapes recovered from an Afghan compound. In one portion of a tape released by the FBI, he is shown caressing and kissing a Kalashnikov rifle.
He is said to come from the Harbi tribe in south-west Saudi Arabia, the same family 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 same 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 prior to Monday’s attacks, and that a committee had been formed between the two capitals to stop the attack from happening.
The Americans were told of Saudi fears, a fact reflected by notices released by the US state department and Britain’s Foreign Office in the first two days of May, warning that a terrorist group may be in the ”final stages” of launching 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 started a surveillance campaign on individuals connected to the house.
It was at this house — only yards from one of the targeted compounds — that Saudi police claimed they had foiled a large terrorist attack on May 6. Explosives, guns and ammunition were found, but the suspects escaped in a gunfight.
Saudi authorities released the pictures and names of 19 suspects — 17 Saudis including Jehani, a Yemeni, and a Kuwaiti-Canadian of Iraqi origin. Saudi officials said that the cell had 50 to 60 members, recruited by Jehani. The weapons were smuggled in from Yemen.
Prince Naif, the Saudi interior minister, said last week that some of the members of the cell involved in the gunfight were al-Qaida suspects who had been detained because they had received military training in Afghanistan. But they had been released because ”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 the intention of establishing how many Britons perished in the bomb attacks.
One Briton is known to have been killed in attack, 15 were injured and two remain unaccounted for, the Foreign Office said. – Guardian Unlimited Â