The Central Command Sunday issued a statement from the Prince Sultan Air Base in Al-Kharj, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Riyadh, in which it acknowledged that its warplanes might have mistakenly attacked a joint US-Kurdish convoy in northern Iraq.

The statement was released at Centcom's forward operating base in Qatar.

On Saturday, the US general commanding the air war against Iraq, Lieutenant General T. Michael Moseley, held a telephone conference call with reporters from his headquarters in Saudi Arabia in which he announced that US fighter aircraft were stacked up around the clock over Baghdad to provide air support for troops in the city.

On March 29, the New York Times published interviews with a number of US officers manning an advanced command and control system at the Prince Sultan base in which they said they were directing the war on Iraq.

The paper said that dozens of men and women were working around the clock at the center "to decide where the missiles and bombs will explode in Iraq."

"Occasionally the targets are wrong, sometimes the munitions stray," said Captain Mike Downs, a "chief of targets" in the Guidance Apportionment and Targeting Unit.

"I've studied it for a long time, so I certainly know what I'm looking at," Captain Downs said of the Iraqi capital. He is based in Germany but has been on assignment in Saudi Arabia since early February, according to the paper.

Riyadh has said it would "under no circumstances" take part in military action against Iraq.

Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal on Tuesday denied that the command and control system at Prince Sultan base was being used to direct the war which began March 20.

"Targeting Iraq is not done from Prince Sultan Air Base. The only duty given to the US troops (there) is to enforce the no-fly zone over (southern) Iraq," he told reporters.

Prince Saud also denied that the kingdom had granted the United States permission to fire cruise missiles over its airspace, saying "there was no permission asked and none given."

But a Saudi Islamist opposition group charged on Saturday that while feigning to oppose the war on Iraq, the Saudi government was granting US and British forces facilities to conduct the campaign.

"No less than 400 US and British fighter jets, transport aircraft and reconnaissance planes are taking off from Prince Sultan Air Base," said the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia in a statement posted on its website.

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