DAMASCUS - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is to hold talks with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah Sunday on the crisis over the murder of Lebanese ex-premier Rafiq Hariri, in which Damascus has been implicated.

The two leaders are due to meet in the Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said during a visit to Damascus where he met his Syrian counterpart Faruq al-Shara.

"I am in Damascus to prepare for this important meeting," Prince Saud said.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency said the Saudi minister also talks with Assad himself but gave no details.

International pressure has been mounting on Assad's regime over the February 2005 murder of Hariri, with a UN probe implicating Syrian intelligence.

The president said in remarks published Saturday that he would only agree to testify to the UN team if the request had a legal basis.

"We have said several times over that we are ready to cooperate with the UN commission of inquiry but this cooperation must be on a legal basis," Assad told the Cairo weekly Al-Usbuh.

Newspapers in Lebanon seized on the implicit refusal to be questioned, which came less than a week after investigators announced they wanted to interview the president as part of its inquiry into last February's assassination.

Former Syrian vice president Abdul Halim Khaddam, now in exile in Paris, has accused Assad of personally threatening Hariri a few months before the former Lebanese leader's murder.

In a series of explosive inteviews with Arab and Western media, Khaddam also openly called for the overthrow of the regime he served so long.

The 73-year-old former vice president called on the opposition to work together, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned on pain of death in Syria since 1980.

But he stressed that he was not calling for foreign help in ending the iron grip which Assad's Baath party has held on Syrian political life since 1963.

But a leading Lebanese opponent of Damascus, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, warned that foreign help would be essential.

"The dictatorship cannot be eradicated by words or noble sentiments, it can only be removed with international help and the backing of both the internal and external opposition," he said in Beirut.

"You can only overthrow a totalitarian regime with foreign backing as, without it, it is difficult to topple a strong-arm government, even one that is already headed for collapse."

A close ally of the slain Hariri who joined with the then premier in breaking with Damascus in 2004, Jumblatt is a leading figure in the anti-Syrian bloc that now controls the Lebanese parliament.

Syria finally pulled its troops out of its tiny neighbour in April last year, ending a three-decade presence, amid a wave of protest following Hariri's assassination in a massive bomb blast on the Beirut seafront.

Copyright © 1999-2005 Lebanonwire^®.com. All rights reserved.