Saudi Arabia is now holding most of the suspects in a 1996 blast that killed 19 US airmen based in the kingdom and will put them on trial soon, Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdel Aziz said Saturday.
"Only three suspects, two of them Saudis and the other a Lebanese, have not been arrested. The other accused are being held in Saudi Arabia," he said in an interview with Al Riyadh newspaper, quoted by AFP.
US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Thursday that a grand jury had indicted 13 Saudis and a Lebanese, alleged members of a Saudi branch of the Lebanese Hizbollah movement, for the blast in the eastern Saudi city of Dhahran.
"The US justice minister's announcement does not concern us and will have no effect on the course of the investigation," said the Saudi interior minister, voicing Riyadh's irritation with the US initiative.
He said the suspects would appear before the Saudi judiciary "in the not too distant future."
The United States "has not kept us informed nor coordinated with us (on the investigation), and I don't know for what reason," the interior minister said.
Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz said Friday that Washington had no right to issue indictments for the June 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers military housing complex that also wounded more than 370 people.
The "American government has the right to discuss the Khobar explosion, but it does not have the right take any (legal) step whatsoever in this matter. Such steps fall within the jurisdiction of Saudi Arabia," he said.
"We very much want to cooperate with every country that has information on any person whatsoever implicated," said Prince Sultan.
Iran's Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, has rejected as baseless US accusations linking Iranian officials to the bombing. "The US judiciary has leveled charges against Iran which have no legal and judicial basis," the ministry said in a statement, cited by the official Iranian news agency (IRNA) Friday.
Ashcroft said elements of the Iranian government "inspired" and "supervised" the Dhahran bombing, although no individual members of Iran's leadership were named in the indictments.
He also noted that under US law, certain charges had to be brought within five years of the June 25, 1996 bombing - Albawaba.com
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