Official Baghdad television quoted a senior Iraqi official who accompanied the pilgrims, as saying yesterday that the Saudis also turned down an Iraqi demand that expenses of the pilgrims be withdrawn from Iraq's assets frozen in Arab and foreign banks.

``The Saudi authorities surrounded our pilgrims' complex with heavy tanks and armoured vehicles and deployed soldiers who carried weapons and automatic rifles...aimed at Iraqi pilgrims,'' the television quoted the official as saying. ``These soldiers fired bullets in order to frighten our pilgrims in an attempt to provoke them, in order to accuse them of riots,'' said Mohsein Fahim Farhoo, an adviser at the presidential office responsible for the pilgrims.

The charges followed recent tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iraq which accused Riyadh of allowing US and British planes to useits bases to launch air strikes on Iraq.

Farhood said, ``The Saudis had turned down an Iraqi proposal to draw money from Iraqi assets (that) were frozen abroad'', to pay the pilgrims' expenses. Iraq's assets were frozen in Arab and foreign banks after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Earlier, nearly 18,000 Iraqis left the Iraq-Saudi border yesterday and headed back home, Iraqi officials said.

They said a convoy of hundreds of buses carrying the pilgrims had crossed the Arar border point, transporting the people back to their cities, towns and villages in Iraq. Saudi officials said the Iraqi pilgrims abandoned the Haj pilgrimage after Iraqi authorities ordered them to return.

``Most of the Iraqi pilgrims have left,'' Hussein al-Anaizi, a Saudi official working at a pilgrims' encampment near the Arar crossing point said.

He said most of the Iraqi pilgrims, who arrived at the pilgrims' city near the crossing point on Friday, left their encampment at around noon yesterday and headed back to theborder.

But Saudi interior minister Prince Nayef Bin abdul-Aziz, who also heads the Haj (pilgrimage) supreme committee, told a news conference in Mecca that Iraqi authorities ordered the pilgrims to return home.

He accused Iraqi authorities of using a religious duty practised by all Muslims, for political ends.

DISAVOWAL OF PAGANS: Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it does not expect trouble from the tens of thousands of Iranians at the annual Moslem pilgrimage to Mecca that starts this week.

"I don't think our Iranian brothers will do anything that could endanger the pilgrimage," said Interior Minister Prince Nayef ibn Abdel Aziz, quoted In Saudi newspapers. He was referring to the anti-US and anti-Israeli demonstration which Iranian Moslems hold each year during Haj. Iran said the demonstration, called "Disavowal of Pagans," was staged without incident last year as pilgrims converged on Mount Arafat, near Mecca. for the high point of the Haj.

In 1987, more than 400 people were killedin clashes between Iranian pilgrims and Saudi security forces.