ROME – Police were turning their search for a terrorist mastermind abroad yesterday after disclosures that two of the men arrested for attempted bombings on July 21 had links with Saudi Arabia.

Hussain Osman, who was caught on Friday in Rome, made a cell phone call to Saudi Arabia shortly before his arrest.

Friends of Muktar Said Ibrahim, who was captured after a siege in Ladbroke Grove, West London, said he went to the kingdom in 2003 for two or three months for a “training course.”

He is said to have family in Saudi Arabia and lived there before coming to Britain as a teenager.

The links are controversial because 15 of the 19 September 11, 2001, hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, as did Osama bin Laden.

“Muktar said he was going training for a year, but we didn’t know what he meant, and he didn’t stay that long,” a friend said. “He was always saying: ‘I can’t wait to go to Saudi.’ He was changing before he went and he had grown a beard.”

The Saudi ambassador to Britain, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of the Saudi Secret Service, told an Arabic newspaper last week that the Saudis were keen to cooperate with British security forces.

“I believe that the terrorist attacks that London witnessed recently are similar to those which have been taking place in Saudi Arabia,” he told Asharq al-Awsat.

America has been critical of Saudi Arabia’s failure to tackle homegrown terrorism, and Prince al-Faisal said last week that he would move to Washington in what is seen as an attempt to mend fences.

Scotland Yard is also eager to find out if there is a radicalized section of the Ethiopian community after Italian police revealed that Mr. Osman had described himself as Ethiopian while living there.

He left Italy to claim asylum in Britain where he described himself as Somali, possibly because it is easier for Somalis to claim asylum than Ethiopians.

Mr. Ibrahim described himself as Eritrean, the country north of Ethiopia that fought a bitter civil war before seceding.

Ethiopia has accused its neighbors of “exporting” Islamic extremism and providing support for “well-trained terrorists” based in the Ogaden region that borders southern Somalia.

Details emerged yesterday of two brothers arrested – one at the apartment in the Peabody building in Dalgarno Gardens and the other on nearby Tavistock Road.

Ramzi and Wahbi Mohammed were well known in the local Muslim community for running a stall to hand out radical literature.

It was claimed yesterday that Mr. Osman joined them, and they were also said to attend the Ladbroke Grove Mosque, yards from the apartment on Tavistock Road. One Ethiopian, who asked not to be named, said, “They would come up to us and say ‘brother,’ but we were not their brothers and we didn’t believe in what they were handing out.”

Mr. Osman, 27, who was arrested at his brother’s apartment in Rome, was said to use the alias Hamdi Adus Issac in Italy. He was found sitting calmly on the sofa after Italian police persuaded his brother, Remzi, to hand over the keys to the apartment to gain access.

His lawyer, Antonietta Sonnessa, said he had admitted that he was involved in the July 21 attacks but said they were “purely a demonstrative gesture. He had no intention of killing anybody.”