Saudi envoy hits out at UK

Saudi Arabia has criticised the British government for ignoring repeated warnings about the danger posed by its dissidents linked to al Qaeda in London, a media report said on Wednesday.

Outgoing Saudi Ambassador to Britain Prince Turki al-Faisal said he had been "going around in circles" during his two-and-half-year posting while trying to make Britain understand the danger posed by Saudi dissidents in London linked to al-Qaeda.

Prince Turki, 60, who has now been appointed envoy to Washington, looked back fondly on his time in London with the exception of the government's inadequate response to dealing with radical Muslims.

In an interview with The Times, he said the most frustrating experience was being shunted around Whitehall by departments trying to pass the buck.

"When you call somebody, he says it is the other guy. If you talk to the security people, they say it is the politicians' fault. If you talk to the politicians they say it is the Crown Prosecution Service. If you call the Crown Prosecution Service, they say, no, it is MI5. So we have been in this runaround for the last two and a half years," he said.

Most of Prince Turki's criticism focussed on the failure of the authorities to take action against two Saudi dissidents, Saad Faqih, head of the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia and his former colleague Mohammad al-Masari.

Faqih was placed on the United Nations terror list last year and is accused by the United States of involvement in the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi. Dr al-Masari runs a website which posts videos of suicide bombings in Iraq and Israel and anti-Western propaganda, the report said.