Pizzas galore!

The Saudi Interior Minister, Prince Nayef, said the attack was probably the work of al-Qaeda.

Al-Ansari was named on a terror alert issued by the FBI in February 2002 with 16 Arabs suspected of links with Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. He is a relative by marriage of Khalid Almihdhar, one of the five men who crashed American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

But Dr al-Massari said that the al-Ansari he remembered might have joined the Taleban in Afghanistan, but was unlikely to be a member of al-Qaeda. Saturday's attack looked like a "cowboy" action arranged on the spur of the moment.

"It seemed to be a reaction to the torture pictures in Iraq," added Dr al-Massari.

"He didn't have a wide education but he had quite an extensive background. He was studying English in London. Then he went to Cambridge and got married to an older lady.

"He was studying and she was helping him with his English. It did not work out because of the age difference."

Afterwards al-Mansari was involved in "Jihad activities" in Africa, Bosnia and Afghanistan, and may also have been arrested in Yemen, said Dr al-Massari.

Dr Saad al-Fagih, who quit the group in 1996 to set up the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia, said he remembered al-Mansari as "a very simple-minded person with little education".

Dr al-Massari and Dr al-Fagih set up CDLR in 1993 to campaign for democratic reform in the Kingdom. The group is based in London because it is outlawed in Saudi Arabia.

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi Foreign Minister, said today: "The leader of the latest attack had links with the renegades al-Fagih and al-Massari. Although these two renegades have no weight whatsoever, it is known that they have contacts with, and even financing from, sides connected to Israel."

He declined to say if Saudia Arabia would ask for the two men's extradition from London. Dr al-Fagih said that the Saudi authorities had to make up their mind who they were accusing if they wanted to be taken seriously.

Muslim activists in London have claimed that al-Ansari was also keenly wanted for questioning by Scotland Yard, but the Metropolitan Police refused to confirm this.