Muammar Qadhafi, alleged to have been involved in a plot on the Saudi Crown prince's life, said June 6 that he regretted former U.S. President Ronald Reagan had died without ever being tried for 1986 air strikes that killed dozens of people, including the Libyan leader's adopted daughter. Photo: Francois Lenoir

Saudi state-guided media on Friday splashed news of a purported Libyan plot to assassinate Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, showing Riyadh's apparent endorsement of the claim despite official silence on the report.

Newspapers assailed the "ungrateful" Libyan leader Moamer Qadhafi, whom Riyadh had helped out of his Lockerbie-imposed isolation, with one daily also implicating the two main London-based Saudi dissidents in the affair.

State television set tone Thursday night by broadcasting The New York Times report that Qadhafi tried to have Abdullah, de facto ruler of the oil-rich kingdom, murdered last year.

US President George W. Bush said Thursday that Washington was investigating the report, which Libya has denied.

The New York Times said two people involved in a plot to fire rockets at Abdullah's motorcade had been detained in the United States and Saudi Arabia and that the plot was being investigated by Washington, Riyadh and London.

The two were named as Abdurahman Almoudi, an American arrested in October for violating a US ban on travel to Libya, and Colonel Muhammad Ismael, a Libyan intelligence officer captured by Egyptian police in November after he fled Saudi Arabia where he tried to pay four Saudi militants.

The Saudi-owned London-based daily Al-Hayat said Saudi Arabia had detained two Libyans handed over by Egypt in the case, in addition to an Egyptian man who had been recruited by Tripoli to "assassinate a prominent Saudi figure."

It said two Egyptian officials visited Saudi Arabia in February to discuss the case before going to Libya, and that Tripoli's decision at the time to close its borders to Egyptians was related to the issue.

According to the paper, Jordan's King Abdullah II brought a message from Qadhafi to Crown Prince Abdullah in April, but a Saudi official said at the time: "No mediation (is acceptable). Let the Libyans apologize publicly before speaking of a mediation."

Two Libyan men attempted to assault Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal in Cairo last September. The pair said they were trying to avenge a verbal slur on Qadhafi, who was called a "liar" by Abdullah at an Arab summit in Egypt in March 2003.

The spat between the two leaders, broadcast live on television, came after Qadhafi charged that Riyadh was ready to "strike an alliance with the devil" to shield itself from then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

The New York Times said Almoudi and Ismael traveled to London to contact Saudi dissidents through whom they could recruit militants in Saudi Arabia to carry out the plan.

The Saudi newspaper Al-Watan said Islamist dissidents Saad al-Faqih and Muhammad al-Masari had provided names of "terrorists prepared to carry out any operation in exchange for a million dollars each."

The two London-based men, who worked together in the early 1990s but later parted ways, had "fiercely competed with each other" to help in return for "huge amounts of money," it said.

In a front-page editorial, Al-Riyadh accused Qadhafi of being ungrateful to Saudi Arabia, which along with South Africa brokered a plan to suspend UN sanctions against Libya imposed over the 1988 bombing of a US airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland.

But given Qadhafi's record, the paper said, it was no surprise that he should have forgotten the favor.

After all, this was the man who began by posing as the heir to Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, then "ran after the left" before harboring and aiding all kinds of terrorist groups.

It added that he went on to champion "the theory of global revolution" by arming the Irish Republican Army, get involved in the war in Lebanon, throw Palestinians at the borders and "brand Arabs and Muslims as infidels in order to unify African states."

Last but not least, Qadhafi "confessed to the crimes of Lockerbie, the downing of a French passenger plane and bombings in Germany, paying exorbitant compensation (to victims' families) because of a crazy whim," which the kingdom helped him pull through, Al-Riyadh said.

The business daily Al-Eqtisadiah, also recalling the Saudi role in getting Qadhafi "out of his international isolation," said the Libyan leader had paid Riyadh back not only by plotting to murder Abdullah, but also by trying to attack Saud al-Faisal and sending "agents" to carry out "acts of sabotage in the kingdom."

To top it all, he charged in a US television interview last year that "what he called the Wahhabi sect in the kingdom was responsible for the emergence of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups," the paper said.AFP