WASHINGTON, 17 May 2003 — Senior Saudi official Adel Al-Jubeir yesterday criticized unnamed US officials who have questioned the Kingdom’s anti-terrorism moves and challenged them to make their complaints publicly and directly.
Addressing a news conference, he said the triple suicide bombings in Riyadh were a “massive jolt” to Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom was redoubling efforts to beef up security and crack down on Al-Qaeda extremists.
Four days after attacks blamed on the Al-Qaeda network killed 34 people, most of them foreigners, Al-Jubeir acknowledged that security had been inadequate and described his country as angry, sad and “sorry for not having been able to win this battle in the war against terrorism ...The attacks were a massive jolt.”
But he said Saudi Arabia had been and would continue to be a strong ally of the United States in the anti-terrorism war. “We will do whatever we need to do in order to confront and destroy the organization and the people who did this. This will not stand,” he said.
Al-Jubeir said the Kingdom would share information with US investigators “almost in real time.” “We’re both in the crosshairs of this organization,” Al-Jubeir said. “We have never had as close, or as strong, a cooperative effort between our two countries as we have now. Have we failed? Yes. On Monday, we failed. We will learn from this mistake, we will ensure it never happens again.”
Authorities in both countries insist it will be different this time as a six-member FBI team begins assessing how many agents and forensic experts will be needed for a full-scale investigation. It may be next week before additional FBI teams are summoned to Riyadh.
On Thursday, US Attorney General John Ashcroft said the Kingdom and the United States need to work together on a continuing basis and an improving basis.
There has been a dispute over precisely what security enhancements the United States sought for the housing compounds that were bombed when it became apparent a terrorist attack was imminent. The State Department says it asked for better security at all compounds housing Westerners. The Kingdom insists the request was made for only a single compound.
At a news conference in Berlin yesterday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said US officials had been in touch with the Saudi officials a week or two before the attacks, warning them about an increased level of terror threats.
But he said he did not know if the Kingdom had information about the sites where terrorists carried out the attacks. “Whether we gave them specific information about those three facilities, I don’t know,” Powell said. “The difficulty that the Saudis would have, or that we would have, is that there are so many facilities in Saudi Arabia that could have been a target of an attack, and no matter how much security you put out and how diligent you are...you always run the risk of a terrorist organization determined to do so able to pull off an attack that will take innocent life.”
