May 4, 2004
 
The man who masterminded a deadly gun attack on an oil refinery in Saudi Arabia was a former member of an opposition group based in the UK, the organisation said.

Mustafa Abdel-Qader Abed al-Ansari is said to have led a shooting rampage on the offices of engineering company ABB in the city of Yanbu, which killed six people including two Britons.

The Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights confirmed that al-Ansari - a Saudi Citizen - lived in London between 1994 and 1996.

Muhammad al-Massari, secretary general of the London-based group which opposes the Saudi royal family, said al-Ansari studied English in the capital and married a woman in Cambridge, before disappearing in late 1996.

"This young man was involved in many Jihad activities in the whole of Africa, Bosnia and Afghanistan," Dr al-Massari told PA News.

Al-Ansari joined the CDLR in 1994, but disappeared after a leadership split in the group in 1996, the Saudi dissident said.

"He stayed with us. A few months later he disappeared. We thought he might have left the country and gone to Afghanistan.

"Since then he has never touched foot in Europe."

Dr al-Massari said he believed al-Ansari, who was around 22 when he lived in the UK, may have joined the Taliban but that he was unlikely to be a member of al Qaida.

"I doubt it," he said. "The type of action looked like a local one."

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