KUWAIT CITY - A Kuwaiti police officer suspected of shooting and wounding two U.S. soldiers before fleeing to Saudi Arabia was arrested there Friday, Kuwaiti and Saudi sources said.

Saudi authorities have told the Kuwaitis they plan to extradite the man suspected of carrying out Thursday's shooting, but that it would take a couple of days, a security source told AFP.

The man, Khalid Messier al-Shimmari, was arrested around 1:00 PM (1000 GMT), the source said without saying where. In Riyadh, the official SPA news agency quoted a Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman as saying the Saudis had apprehended the "Kuwaiti whose arrest had been requested by the authorities in Kuwait."

The neighboring countries were discussing his extradition to Kuwait, the spokesman said.

The Kuwaiti Interior Ministry had previously said a junior officer in the Kuwaiti police force had shot two U.S. soldiers on Thursday before fleeing across the border into Saudi Arabia.

U.S. military officers said the soldiers, who are assigned to the third army, were in a civilian vehicle but on "official business" while traveling on a highway south of Kuwait City.

Their condition was labeled "serious but stable" and their status remained the same Friday, Colonel Rick Thomas, a spokesman at Camp Doha military base, told AFP earlier. One was shot in the face and the other in the shoulder.

"I don't think we've seen anything that indicates" it was an attack involving "Al-Qaeda or some other terrorist organization", Thomas said.

Asked if the shooting was considered an anti-American attack, Thomas said, "I think until we finish the joint investigation" with the Kuwaitis, the motive can not be established.

Kuwaiti newspapers Friday said the suspect was not affiliated with any religious group and that he had a history of psychological problems. A senior Kuwaiti security source told AFP the suspect "had been admitted to hospital three times for psychiatric treatment." The source, who is close to the investigation, said he "dropped his companion, another policeman, at home and told him he was going to buy a newspaper and would be returning. The incident happened while he was out buying the paper."

The suspect may have initially pulled the two soldiers over for speeding before shooting them, the source said.

The attack, condemned by Kuwaiti officials and MPs, was the fifth shooting incident involving U.S. forces in Kuwait since October 8 when two Kuwaitis killed a marine and wounded another during wargames on Failaka Island, 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of Kuwait City.

Until the Thursday incident, no U.S. forces were wounded in the susequent attacks, and it was never clarified if they had even been targeted.

Kuwait, liberated from Iraqi occupation by a U.S.-led multinational coalition in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, condemned the Failaka shooting as a "terrorist" act.

However, Kuwaiti officials generally played down the three incidents that followed, saying the shots could have been fired by bird hunters.

The emirate has since sealed off the entire northwestern region, one quarter of the country, in what it described as a precaution during ongoing joint Kuwaiti-American military exercises.

One of the two assailants gunned down in the island attack had sworn allegiance to Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, the interior minister has said.

Around 10,000 U.S. troops are currently based in Kuwait, mostly at Camp Doha, 30 kilometers (19 miles) north of Kuwait City.