Fourteen men - 13 Saudis and one Lebanese - were indicted in absentia by the US government yesterday with the terrorist bombing at a US military base in Saudi Arabia which killed 19 servicemen in 1996. The truck bomb, which injured more than 300 other people, exploded outside Khobar Towers, an apartment block in Dharan where the servicemen were living.
The list of those charged - announced by the US attorney general, Mr John Ashcroft, and the FBI director, Mr Louis Freeh - includes the leader of Saudi Hizbullah and prominent members of its military wing.
Mr Ashcroft said the indictment explained that members of the Iranian government "inspired, supported and supervised" members of Saudi Hizbullah, and that the terrorists "reported surveillance activities to Iranian officials".
The indictment list is more significant for the names it omits than those it includes. Although Mr Ashcroft said Iranians were behind the conspiracy, and warned that more indictments were possible, the omission of Iranians from the list represented a climbdown by the FBI and, in particular, its outgoing director, Mr Freeh, who has made the investigation a personal crusade.
For years the bureau's agents privately insisted that they had enough information to indict senior members of Iranian intelligence, and possibly even the country's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In a list of suspects Mr Freeh handed to the White House recently, there were reported to be several high-ranking Iranian officials. Brig Ahmad Sherifi, a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guard, was a leading suspect. Mr Ahmed Vahidi, the head of the Guard's al-Quds (Jerusalem) force responsible for covert external operations, has also been frequently mentioned.
The charges, announced a few days before the fifth anniversary of the bombing, are the culmination of an FBI investigation which was continually muddied by foreign policy manoeuvring and Washington intrigue. In the New Yorker, Mr Freeh blamed the Clinton administration for putting the brakes on the investigation in the interests of rapprochement with the reformist government of President Mohammad Khatami in Iran.