By RUPERT CORNWELL
WASHINGTON - Investigators are concentrating on a "Saudi connection" to the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, suggesting that part of the conspiracy was hatched there - to the intense disquiet of the ruling monarchy.
Relations were already uneasy between the United States and the world's largest oil exporter - which happens to be both Washington's key ally in the Gulf and the birthplace of Osama bin Laden.
At the outset of the terror investigation, it emerged that up to 12 of the 19 hijackers of the four aircraft used that day had entered the US with Saudi passports or with visas issued by US consulates in that country.
Since then more than 700 people have been questioned or detained by US authorities in connection with the attacks - among them an unspecified number of Saudi citizens.
Neither the Saudi Embassy in Washington nor the Justice Department will say how many of the suspects are Saudis: indeed, so little has been divulged about the round-up, and so minor are some of the charges on which the detained are being held, that US civil rights groups are asking whether constitutional rights have been violated.
According to lawyers, two members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family were detained for more than 20 days after being picked up at Denver Airport, and one of them held for part of that time in isolation. They were finally released last week, but will still have to answer for minor infringements of immigration laws.
In the meantime, the embassy has retained lawyers for all the Saudi suspects, the Wall Street Journal reported this week, following personal instructions from Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan to the embassy's legal counsel that "each and every one of them is to be helped as if you have no other cases and nothing else to do".
This vigorous stance may be an admirable example of a country helping its citizens who find themselves in difficulty abroad. But it is bound to raise fears in the US that - as in the probe into the deadly 1996 attack on US barracks at Khobar, Saudi Arabia - the kingdom may prove less than fully cooperative with US investigations into a terrorist incident with which it is linked.
In the case of September 11, pointers to such connections continue to grow.
American investigators believe that several of the hijackers involved in the devastating attacks on New York and Washington, in which over 5000 died, were recruited by al Qaeda cells operating in Saudi Arabia.
The inquiry is focusing on the southwestern town of Abha, from where four hijackers are believed to have originated.
People from this region have also been linked with the attack on the destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden last October in which 17 US sailors died.
These allegations, and others that Saudi-based charities and companies have channelled finance to bin Laden and his network, have placed the kingdom on the defensive and increased resentment of the US within Saudi Arabia - the very result that the Bush Administration is seeking to avoid.
In a television interview last month, Prince Bin Sultan, ambassador since 1983 and with legendary close connections to the White House, acknowledged that individuals in Saudi society supported bin Laden, but that their numbers were few. "When you say 'so many' you have to put it relatively," he told his questioner. "Relative to what? Are there 16, 20, 100?
"Bin Laden - what he represents, and people who preach like him or who support him - yes, they don't like my Government. Yes, they don't like my political system. But they don't like it for the wrong reasons, not for the right reasons you think of. They want us to go back 1000 years. We want to move forward."
But these arguments have not stilled the public criticism. A New York Times editorial at the weekend declared that the "deeply cynical and cold-blooded bargain" at the heart of the Saudi-US relationship - Saudi oil in exchange for American military protection - needs updating.
"Decades of equivocation and Hobbesian calculations have left US-Saudi relations in an untenable and unreliable state," the paper said.
"These deformities must be addressed before they do further damage to both nations."
- INDEPENDENT
Story archives:
Links: War against terrorism
Timeline: Major events since the Sept 11 attacks
Conspiracy links test Gulf ally
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