Saudi Arabia offered BBC terror victim Frank Gardner up to £1million in compensation – then failed to pay up, it emerged yesterday.

Gardner was shot on the streets of the Arab kingdom capital Riyadh while reporting for the corporation, and left reliant on a wheelchair, but has bravely continued his job as a security correspondent regardless.

Now, 11 years after the Al Qaeda attack which left his BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers dead, a fresh batch of documents released by the WikiLeaks website, this time of 60,000 top secret Saudi diplomatic documents, has confirmed the oil-rich monarchy offered compensation over the attack on its soil.

Saudi Arabia offered £1million in compensation to the BBC's Frank Gardner, but failed to pay up

Yet Gardner, 54, has revealed that despite the kingdom's apparent willingness to compensate him, it had failed to do so.

Gardner, whose spine was permanently damaged in the shooting, said at the weekend after the document was published: 'It is true that in the aftermath of the serious injuries I sustained from a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in 2004 there were some discussions with the Saudi embassy over compensation.

'A figure was agreed but in the end no money was ever paid.'

There was surprise at the original terror attack having taken place at all, because Saudi Arabia is such a tightly controlled conservative kingdom. Embarrassment over such a high profile attack having gone ahead may have led to the nation feeling some responsibility to react.

Public confirmation that the Saudis were indeed considering paying Gardner came in a leaked memo, in Arabic, signed by Prince Saud al-Faisal, Saudi foreign minister until a few months ago.

The undated memo noted that the BBC man had asked for compensation and that the Saudis' London ambassador had agreed a sum of £1m. According to Prince Saud, such a payout made political sense.

Prince Saud said in the memo: 'The journalist has not made negative statements about the kingdom in any of his conferences, talk shows and public appearances after his release from hospital.'

Gardner was shot on the streets of the Arab kingdom capital Riyadh while reporting for the corporation, and left reliant on a wheelchair, but has bravely continued his job as a security correspondent regardless

Gardner, who was shot six times in the attack had referred to the difficulties over compensation, saying in 2009: 'The Saudi authorities I'm pretty miffed with, because five years on they've not paid one penny of compensation – and this is not a country that's short of a bob or two.

'They've made promises, they've bluffed and blustered and then just failed to do anything, which really wouldn't have hurt them.

'So, you know, I'm pretty cross with them actually.'

The Saudi Embassy in London's Mayfair – which is guarded by machine gun-wielding British police officers – yesterday declined to discuss the affair.

In Riyadh, the Arab kingdom's Foreign Ministry used Twitter to broadcast a message urging people not to distribute any of the vast haul of documents published on WikiLeaks, saying they 'might be faked', but did not expressly attempt to deny there was any truth in them.

The gunman in the attack, Adel Al-Dhubaiti, remains locked up in a Saudi jail.

Gardner was shot six times in the attack (pictured) in 2004 that left cameraman Simon Cumbers dead

The released documents - embassy communications, emails between diplomats and reports from other state bodies - include discussions of Saudi Arabia's position regarding regional issues and efforts to influence media.

The world's top oil exporter, an absolute monarchy, is highly sensitive to public criticism and has imprisoned activists for publishing attacks on the ruling Al Saud dynasty and senior clerics. It maintains tight control over local media.

Since the 2011 'Arab Spring' uprisings were partly prompted by earlier WikiLeaks revelations about corrupt Middle Eastern regimes, the Saudi authorities have grown increasingly intolerant of dissent, apparently fearful that the instability sweeping neighbouring countries will in turn hit the conservative Islamic kingdom.

Saturday's statement is the only official government response since the release, which WikiLeaks says is the first batch of more than half a million Saudi documents it has obtained and plans to publish.

WikiLeaks did not say where it obtained the documents, but it referred in a press release to Riyadh's statement in May that it had suffered a breach of its computer networks, an attack later claimed by a group calling itself the Yemeni Cyber Army.