Homeland Security, and other agencies have been aware of the Saudi actions for at least a decade, officials said. But successive American administrations have avoided confronting the government in Riyadh out of concern that doing so might jeopardize US interests, particularly Saudi cooperation in the fight against Islamist terrorism, current and former officials said.

"It's not that the issue of Saudi fugitives from the US wasn't important," said retired FBI agent Jeffrey Danik, who served as the agency's assistant legal attache in Riyadh from 2010 to 2012. "It's that the security relationship was so much more important. On counterterrorism, on protecting the US and its partners, on opposing Iran, the Saudis were invaluable allies."

Read more: Some of the 37 men killed by Saudi Arabia in its latest mass executionreportedly claimed they were forced to confess to crimes they didn't commit

American officials said Saudi diplomats, intelligence officers, and other operatives have assisted in the illegal flight of Saudi fugitives, most of them university students, after they were charged with crimes including rape and manslaughter. The Saudis have bailed the suspects out of jail, hired lawyers to defend them, arranged their travel home and covered their forfeited bonds, the officials said.

A workman slides a dustmop over the floor at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Va. Associated Press/J. Scott Applewhite A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, said that only "a small fraction" of Saudi students in the United States have gotten into legal trouble, and that Saudi officials have "strictly adhered to all