Experts Ask: Did Saudi Crackdown Light Fuse of Bomb? : Motives: Critics complain of repression. But anti-American feelings may also have played a role.

After a year of an increasingly ruthless government crackdown on dissent, the eruption of violence in Saudi Arabia was almost predictable, Persian Gulf specialists said Monday.

Tensions have been higher recently than at any time since 1979, when the Grand Mosque in Mecca was seized for two weeks by Islamic extremists.

U.S. officials are focusing on both domestic groups and foreign agents as possible culprits in Monday’s explosion in the parking lot of a national guard center in Riyadh, which killed five Americans and wounded dozens of others, according to U.S. officials.

The motive may be related to actions by one of the world’s most authoritarian monarchies against the clergy, universities and other sources of dissent, according to analysts and U.S. officials, and the bombing could also have been aimed at the heavy U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and Saudi government corruption.

“The opposition has been driven totally underground,” said Aziz Abu Hamad, a Saudi specialist at Human Rights Watch, an independent monitoring group based in New York. “Mosque sermons, books, leaflets and audiocassettes which once openly criticized corruption and called for more political participation were muted during 1995 as the government enforced its strict ban on public speaking, assembly and association.”

Hundreds have been arrested, particularly Islamists, and executions on charges ranging from drugs to murder have increased fourfold over 1994, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on Saudi Arabia.

In August, the kingdom acknowledged that it secretly tried, convicted and executed an opposition activist--with “total disregard for internationally recognized standards of due process,” the report said. The man’s sentence, which had been increased after the government protested that the original prison term was not harsh enough, was not announced until a day after he was beheaded.

And the report quotes Ministry of Interior warnings to Saudi citizens and foreign residents against publicly criticizing the state’s “internal, foreign, financial, media or other policies” or “communicating [criticism] with anyone outside the country or any activist inside the country by telephone or fax.”

As a result, the political climate has changed. “One could seriously speculate that this has led the traditional opposition to lose its leadership to extremists,” Abu Hamad said.

U.S. officials are still cautious about laying blame. “We’re not prepared to draw any conclusions at this stage,” said a leading U.S. counterterrorism official. “Remember, the [1988] Pam Am 103 bombing took a year before we knew who was really involved. And the story behind the [1983] Marine bombing in Beirut is still not fully known.”

But U.S. officials are virtually unanimous in believing that the United States was the primary target of Monday’s bombing, despite the fact that the explosive could have been both better placed and better timed to kill or injure American troops.

One of two Saudi groups to claim responsibility was the Movement for Islamic Change in the Arabian Peninsula--Jihad Wing. The group was first heard from in April, when it sent faxes calling for the withdrawal of all “crusaders” from the desert kingdom and an end to rule by the House of Saud.

Unless all foreigners, Western military troops and senior Saudi princes left the country by June 28, the movement said, it would “exert all available means to evict these forces from the island of Islam.” It sent more faxes in June.

U.S. officials are taking the group’s claim seriously although they have no concrete evidence linking the group to the attack.

The Tigers of the Gulf, a group not heard from before, also claimed responsibility for the Monday blast in a call to a news agency in the Persian Gulf region. “If the Americans don’t leave the kingdom as soon as possible, we will continue our actions,” the caller said.

Besides these two groups, Saudi Arabia has several other underground cells that have expressed varying degrees of anti-American sentiment. Among them is the Advice and Reformation Committee led by Osama ibn Laden, a Saudi businessman who was a major contributor to the fight against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Because of his support for radical Islamic groups, including some who have targeted U.S. interests in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia stripped Ibn Laden of his citizenship, and he now lives mostly in Britain and Sudan.

U.S. officials do not rule out an unknown group in the Monday bombing.

“The Saudis have a pretty good lid on local Islamic extremists, so I don’t see that any of the ones we know about would be in a position to do something like this. It may be someone unexpected,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official.

One of the best-known opposition groups is the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, founded in 1993 by Islamist jurists and academics. Now headquartered in London after being forced into exile, it strongly condemned the bombing.

“We were not involved in any way. Our program for the past four years has been to promote peaceful change and to prevent this sort of thing. We’re trying to channel anger into proper means,” said Dr. Saad Faqih, director of the committee’s London office. The denial is considered credible by many Saudi watchers.

Saudi officials clearly feel threatened by the committee, however. Abdallaal Hudhaif, the 33-year-old businessman and activist who was secretly beheaded in August, had been charged with throwing acid on an intelligence officer, possessing firearms and fomenting dissent by supporting the exiled committee. At the same time, nine others, including several of the man’s relatives who were university lecturers, were sentenced to long prison terms for “heresy and rebellion.”

Because of the government’s Draconian actions, Faqih, a surgeon, said the committee had been “expecting this sort of violence to happen.”

The crackdown dates to the arrest of several prominent Islamist clerics in the fall of 1994. Among them were two popular sheiks and university professors, Salman Awdah and Safar Hawali, who had been banned from speaking in public and dismissed from their academic posts a year earlier.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Awdah had been preaching against the U.S. military buildup and Saudi Arabian policies and corruption. He was arrested after breaking a 1993 ban on preaching.