RIYADH: A congressional report suggesting Saudi Arabia may have had a hand in the September 11, 2001, attacks is an attempt by US hawks to step up pressure on Riyadh and force radical, possibly Iraq-like, changes, analysts here said on Friday.

The report, released on Thursday, highlighted complaints from US federal agents about “a lack of Saudi cooperation in terrorism investigations both before and after the Sept 11 attacks”.

“There might have been unintentional mistakes by charities and the like, but it is impossible that the Saudi government was involved in the attacks. It would be beyond comprehension,” a leading liberal political analyst, Turky al Hamad, said.

“The (US) neo-conservatives hope to see what happened in Afghanistan and Iraq also take place in Saudi Arabia. They want drastic, complete changes. That’s why they are attacking the kingdom,” Mr Hamad said.

For reasons of national security, the White House blacked out an entire section of the report, with several Congressmen claiming this was a misguided attempt to protect Riyadh from embarrassment.

Several lawmakers sent a letter to President George Bush demanding the White House declassify the blacked-out sections.

“The campaign against Riyadh is obviously politically-motivated. It appears more of a political report than stating the truth with regard to Saudi Arabia,” Ihsan Bu-Hulaiga, a leading economist and member of the Shura, said.

The Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, on Thursday slammed as blatantly false the allegations made in the report.

“In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being used by some to malign our country and our people. Rumours, innuendo and untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the day.

“It is my belief that the reason a classified section that allegedly deals with foreign governments is absent from the report is most likely because the information contained in it could not be substantiated,” the envoy said.

Newsmen were able to confirm through various sources close to the investigation that the top-secret pages are for the most part about what the United States alleges is Saudi failure to clamp down on the Al Qaeda network.

Relations between Washington and Riyadh were severely strained after the Sept 11 attacks as 15 of the 19 presumed hijackers who carried out the attacks were Saudis.

But since then, the Saudi government has taken several important steps in the fight against “terrorism” and passed and implemented legislation in this field.

The Shura recently approved an anti-money laundering law stipulating stiff penalties for violators and another law on organizing charities and fund-raising activity to ensure funds do not reach terrorists.

“These laws and other measures show that major efforts were made by the kingdom to combat terror. Saudi Arabia itself has been a victim of terrorism, and the May 12 suicide bombings are evidence of that,” Bu Hulaiga said, referring to the triple bombings in Riyadh that killed at least 35 people.

In a report released last week by the Saudi embassy in Washington about counter-terrorism action, Prince Bandar said authorities had questioned over 1,000 individuals and arrested more than 500 suspects, 150 of them following the May 12 bombings.

The Saudis have also frozen 41 bank accounts of seven individuals suspected of having links to terrorism. The accounts totalled 5.6 million dollars, Prince Bandar said.

The 9/11 report repeats media claims that Omar al Bayoumi, an associate of two of the hijackers, could have been a Saudi government agent.

The report details his ties with two suicide attackers, Khaled al Mihdar and Nawaf al Hazmi.

But Prince Bandar in a statement denied the claim as “baseless and not true”. Al Bayoumi was detained in London after Sept 11, 2001, and questioned by US and British law enforcement officials.

On return to Saudi Arabia, he was again questioned by law enforcement officials and found not to have links with terrorists, he said.

“Pro-Israel conservatives (in the United States) are wasting no time to attack Riyadh, apparently for refusing to establish ties with Tel Aviv. They have a principled (anti-) Saudi policy and a principled (pro-) Israeli policy,” Mr Hamad said.—AFP