Saudis Say They Have Found Bombers’ Getaway Car

Saudi Arabian authorities said Sunday that they have found the getaway car used by the bombers who killed 19 American airmen at a Dhahran military compound last month, but U.S. officials cautioned that they still are not sure it is the right vehicle.

Wire services quoted Saudi officials as saying they had located an abandoned white Chevrolet Caprice Classic in Dammam, six miles from Dhahran, a few days after the bombing. There was no indication why they waited until Sunday to make the discovery public.

But U.S. officials said it is not clear that the car is the one involved in the June 25 attack. The make and model is the most popular in Saudi Arabia, and officials said the evidence linking it to the bombing is tenuous.

Officials in Washington also confirmed that authorities in Dhahran still have not identified any suspects in the bombing. They said reports in Saudi newspapers last week that two men had been taken into custody were erroneous.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh was expected to return here late Sunday after a two-day visit to the desert kingdom during which he reportedly pressed Saudi King Fahd to allow FBI agents and other U.S. officials to interview witnesses and suspects and to have access to intelligence.

There was no immediate indication of whether Freeh was successful in his bid. U.S. officials here were unusually closemouthed about the issue, saying they did not want to upset the investigation in Saudi Arabia.

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Meanwhile, the Saudi defense minister, Prince Sultan ibn Abdulaziz, told wire service reporters Sunday that he is not in favor of moving U.S. troops to new locations outside Dhahran, despite earlier suggestions by U.S. officials that Washington was considering such action.

But analysts in Washington suggested that the prince’s remarks were intended primarily for domestic consumption and did not reflect a rejection of the idea by the Saudis. They said the Pentagon has not yet prepared a detailed plan for any shifting of troops.

U.S. officials have said the United States and Saudi Arabia were close to an agreement in principle on moving many U.S. personnel from Dhahran and Riyadh, the Saudi capital, to the remote Al Kharj air base, in the desert 50 miles southeast of Riyadh, where they would be safer from security threats.

The officials have said the only major obstacle was determining who will pay for expanding housing and other facilities at the air base, which is still being built. Washington wants the Saudis to foot most of the bill. A decision is expected soon.

Last week, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said it was virtually certain that some of the 1,500 U.S. military personnel based in Riyadh would be moved to other locations. “The question is when and how many” will be moved, he said. A Saudi official here confirmed that understanding.

But on Sunday, Prince Sultan told wire services that moving the Americans would not be “right” because “if we have to move them from where they live now . . . we have to prepare them another lodging.”

A few minutes later, however, he remarked that an “announcement now on any movement is not of any benefit,” suggesting that he was primarily worried about the timing of the disclosures.

Finding the getaway car in the June attack would be a major breakthrough in the investigation of the bombing. Reports from Saudi Arabia quoted officials there as saying the car they are now holding was stolen from a Saudi contracting company a few days before the attack. They said the car originally was gray but was painted white before the bombing.

The terrorists drove a fuel truck containing a 3,000- to 5,000-pound bomb near a complex that housed U.S. Air Force personnel at the Dhahran compound and left it to explode while they fled in a car.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials in Riyadh said Americans living in Saudi Arabia are continuing to receive threatening phone calls from people speaking Arabic or broken English. “It is likely that some of these reports reflect planning for further attacks,” one official said.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this report.