"Qatari authorities accuse Saudi officials of involvement in the attempted coup in 1996" against Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, an Arab diplomat told AFP Friday.

For their part, "Saudi officials accuse Qatar of financing the Saudi opposition exiled in London, including Saad al-Faqih," who heads the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA), the diplomat added.

The Qatari emir and Riyadh governor Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, a brother of Saudi King Fahd, held talks on a yacht off Monte Carlo on Thursday in a meeting organised by Kuwaiti Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah.

"The meeting was held ... in a brotherly atmosphere and concerned relations between the two countries and the situation in the region, and it could be followed by other meetings," Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani told Al-Jazeera television late Thursday.

The objective of the talks was to "improve relations between the two countries," he added.

Asked about future relations, the minister said: "So far, there is nothing clear, but we have today's (Thursday's) negotiations and this could be followed by others."

According to the June 10 edition of the privately circulated Gulf States Newsletter, based in Britain, the Monte Carlo talks were partly "to discuss Saudi claims of Qatari support for elements of the exiled Saudi Islamist opposition based in London."

MIRA, headed by Faqih since 1996, is a splinter of the Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights (CDLR), which was formed in 1993 and immediately banned in Saudi Arabia.

CDLR spokesman Mohammad al-Masari has lived in exile in Britain since 1994.

The Saudi authorities last month implicated Faqih and Masari in a May 1 attack in the industrial Red Sea city of Yanbu which killed six Westerners.

The man who "led and planned for (the four assailants who carried out the shooting spree in Yanbu) is Saudi national Mustafa Abdul Kader Abed al-Ansari, who was wanted by security authorities," an interior ministry official said.

"He last left the kingdom (around 10 years ago) and joined one Saad al-Faqih and one Mohammad al-Masari," said the official.

Ansari "worked with them in their suspicious committee," the official said in a reference to the CDLR.

In the framework of Kuwaiti mediation, first launched during last December's Gulf summit in Kuwait, "Qatari officials requested to discuss their accusations implicating Saudi Arabia in the 1996 coup," another Gulf diplomat told AFP.

"But the Saudis refused, totally rejecting their (Qatar's) accusations," the Gulf diplomat added.

In May 2001, Qatar's appeal court condemned 19 people to death – 18 of them Qataris, including a cousin of the current emir, and one Saudi – for their role in a failed 1996 coup.

The accused were charged with trying to restore former emir Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, who was deposed by his son Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa in June 1995.

Kuwait, the current chairman of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has a strong interest in resolving the row between the two GCC members, which prompted Saudi Arabia to block construction of a pipeline across its territory through which Kuwait had wanted to import Qatari gas.

The dispute began in summer 2002 when the Qatar-based satellite television channel Al-Jazeera aired a discussion programme in which participants strongly criticised the Saudi royal family.

Riyadh recalled its ambassador from Doha in September of that year and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah boycotted a GCC summit in the Qatari capital.AFP