Reuters  --  Arab News

BERN, Switzerland, 18 February 2004 — Saudi Arabia accused the international community yesterday of a double standard over weapons programs in the Middle East, saying nobody questioned Israel about its nuclear arms.

“There are issues of armaments that are never even brought to the fore,” said Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal.

“We know Israel has atomic weapons. They have weapons of mass destruction....and no question is asked about that,” he told journalists while on a visit to the Swiss capital.

Israel is believed to have around 200 nuclear warheads, but the Jewish state’s policy is not to discuss the issue.

Prince Saud had been asked about concerns, expressed by US officials at the weekend, that China was still supplying missiles to Saudi Arabia that could be used to launch nuclear weapons.

He said that he did not know on what the reports were based or whether they were “truly representative” of the views of the US administration. Saudi Arabia is a key US ally and has cooperated with Washington’s “war on terror”.

In London, a senior Saudi diplomat said yesterday the Kingdom was doing its best to protect people from terror attacks but called for more international cooperation to stamp out the threat.

“It is the responsibility of the whole world to fight,” said Abdullah Al-Shaghrood after Britain warned that “terrorists” could be in the final stages of planning an attack in Saudi Arabia.

“The government of Saudi Arabia will do its best to protect all people living in Saudi Arabia no matter if they are foreigners or Saudis. It is our duty to do so,” the Saudi charge d’affaires in London told Reuters.

But he said: “Terrorism is an international problem we have to deal with.” The British government’s warning was “a decision they (Britain) took and it is really up to them”, he added.

“We share intelligence with the British government and we think that with more coordination and exchange of information, we would be able to fight it (terrorism) and demolish it.”

The Foreign Office warning followed an announcement from Saudi Arabia on Friday that a car owned by a wanted militant had been packed with explosives to be used in what it called a criminal act in the capital.

Shaghrood said he had no further details on the car.

Saudi Arabia is battling militant violence blamed on supporters of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network. Suicide bombings against residential compounds in Riyadh last May and November killed more than 50 people.

Twenty-three of the 26 most wanted suspects named by the Saudi government in December are still at large, and two weeks ago security forces found a new cache of arms in the capital, including a car bomb and rocket-propelled grenades.

Riyadh authorities say that in the last year they have seized 24 tons of explosives in the Kingdom as well as hundreds of explosive belts and automatic rifles.