SECURITY chiefs in Saudi Arabia claimed yesterday that the 29-year-old mastermind of the suicide attacks on three Riyadh residential compounds took his orders directly from Osama bin Laden.

Officials named Mohammed al-Juhani as the leader of the al-Qaeda cell, who slipped into the kingdom two months ago using fake documents with orders to target Westerners living in the kingdom.

Prince Nayef, the Saudi Interior Minister, said that the men were believed to take orders from the al-Qaeda leader. He did not rule out the possibility of more attacks.

Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Foreign Minister, said that it was believed that 15 Saudi men took part in the bombings, which killed at least 34 people, including two Britons.

The FBI is said to have film of Mr al-Juhani found in Afghanistan in the bombed-out home of a top deputy of bin Laden. In the film he is seen boasting that he is ready to die as a martyr in a terror attack and is shown caressing and kissing a Kalashnikov rifle before he grins at the camera.

Mr al-Juhani left Saudi Arabia at 18 and fought in Bosnia and Chechnya before moving to Afghanistan with al-Qaeda’s high command. He is said to have recruited 60 men to the organisation, smuggling many of them through Yemen.

Mr al-Juhani, who is part of the Harbi tribe from the Western province of Saudi Arabia, is believed to have been with bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders in the Tora Bora mountains as they made their last stand in Afghanistan.

Saudi officials claim to have been closing in on him a week ago, when police found a large cache of weapons in a villa close to one of the residential compounds that was attacked.

They said that one of 19 men, whom they named as part of the cell, had given himself up but did not divulge details of the triple suicide attack.

Prince Saud said communications by the cell that had been intercepted indicated that some kind of attack was being planned.

He revealed that Saudi Arabia and the United States had created a committee “to see what we could do to prevent it; we came very close to doing that”.

Prince Saud admitted that there were security lapses at Western residences before the attacks, despite pleas from American diplomats for tighter protection.

The bodies of nine of the bombers have been found but Prince Saud gave no indication as to what happened to the other six men alleged to have taken part in the attacks, nor did he reveal any clues as to the whereabouts of their leader.

As Scotland Yard detectives in Riyadh began their investigation into the attacks, Tony Blair condemned the bombings as “cowardly and disgraceful”.

“They will make the UK and our allies across the international community, however, only more determined to track down terrorists and stamp out terrorism,” the Prime Minister told MPs in the Commons.

The Scotland Yard anti-terrorist squad officers, together with a dozen FBI agents in the Saudi capital, are demanding that the Saudis share all their intelligence about al-Qaeda cells operating inside their borders. The FBI and Scotland Yard teams fear that the authorities will not allow them to interrogate suspects or examine the evidence. They say that they are experiencing difficulties in examining forensic evidence at the scene.

Questions are also being asked in Washington as to whether the CIA and others were given sufficent information by Riyadh about the al-Qaeda threat. Last night the United States delivered a sharp warning to Saudi Arabia, urging it to crack down more vigorously on al-Qaeda cells. “The Saudi Arabians have to deal with the fact that there’s terror inside their country,” Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, said.

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