Ken Neill, consul at the British Embassy, quoted Interior Minister Prince Naif as saying recently that “the case is still before the courts.”

“All Britons detained in the Kingdom are in good health and I am going to see one of them today,” Neill said. He was responding to a question raised by Arab News on the basis of a report in the Glasgow Herald on Monday accusing the British and Saudi governments of maltreatment of the Britons.

The Herald report said that the families of the six Britons jailed in Saudi Arabia have joined forces and may consider taking “drastic action” to publicize the plight of the detainees.

“The British Embassy has had regular consular access to the detainees, and they are being looked after properly by the local authorities,” Neill said.

The report in the Glasgow Herald accuses the British Foreign Office of “cruelty” as its promise of an early release of the Britons, presumably before the war in Iraq, never materialized.

“Relatives of the men, who have been imprisoned for more than two years, released an emotional open letter in Britain criticizing the Foreign Office for playing a ‘cruel trick’ on them by telephoning them on the eve of the war telling them to be on standby to be picked up by officers from Scotland Yard to travel to Heathrow airport for a reunion,” the report said. “They had been led to believe that the Saudis would pardon the men,” it added.

The open letter, which includes personal messages from the families of the detainees — Sandy Mitchell, Bill Sampson, James Cottle, Les Walker, James Patrick Lee and Peter Brandon — states: “Truth does not prevail in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.”

Two of the men, Mitchell, 44, and Sampson, a British citizen with a Canadian passport, could face execution for allegedly planting the car bomb that killed Christopher Rodway in Nov. 2000, the report said.

However, the British Embassy said it had not been told of any sentence by the Saudi authorities. The Canadian Embassy also said earlier that the courts are still considering the case. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw raised the much-publicized case with Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, during his visit to the Kingdom last week, according to the Herald report.