JEDDAH: The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz travelled to Morocco yesterday for an “official visit”, state news agency SPA reported, refuting rumours that the octogenarian monarch’s health was deteriorating.
The king, who was born in 1924, has spent time in Morocco recovering after operations in recent years.
But SPA published pictures showing princes and officials greeting the king at Jeddah airport before his departure for Morocco, where the royal family has properties in Casablanca and the southwestern port of Agadir.
The report challenged rumours in the media that the ageing monarch’s health had deteriorated seriously.
King Abdullah is still having difficulty walking after two operations in October 2011 and November 2012 to correct a “ligamentary slackening” in the upper back. Doctors discharged him from hospital in December last year. His half-brother Prince Salman, born in 1935, was named crown prince in June last year after the death of Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz.
Tehran slams jail
term for US-Iranian
TEHRAN: Iran yesterday condemned the United States for sentencing an Iranian-American citizen for plotting to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, saying it was in line with “an Iranophobia project”.
Manssor Arbabsiar, 58, was sentenced on Thursday to a maximum 25 years in prison by a US judge after he pleaded guilty last October to conspiring with Iranian Revolutionary Guards elements to hire assassins from the Mexican drug mafia to kill Riyadh’s envoy.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Abbas Araqchi said the verdict was “another step taken in line with the Iranophobia project by the US,” media reported.
“This proves that the independence of the US justice system is being compromised for political ends,” Araqchi said, questioning the legality of the verdict and saying Arbabsiar was kept “in inhumane and unacceptable conditions”. “Any possible confession or verdict issued... lacks judicial value,” he added.
Iranian tourists back in Egypt after protests
CAIRO: Iranian tourists are back in Egypt yesterday after a two-month moratorium on visas for travellers from the Shia country following hardline Sunni Islamist protests, an Egyptian official said.
A plane owned by private Egyptian carrier Air Memphis flew to Tehran to bring the tourists to Aswan in southern Egypt, said Sherif Ibrahim, chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority.
The tourists will visit pharaonic sites, he added.
Egypt’s civil aviation minister, Wael Al Maadawy, had already indicated the flights would resume after their suspension in April, just a month after the first commercial flight from Tehran to Cairo in decades.
Relations between the two countries thawed after Islamist President Mohammed Mursi was elected Egypt’s president last year. Both Mursi and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have visited each other’s capital in summits.
Four Mexican tourists die in Sinai accident
CAIRO: Four Mexican tourists were killed and 17 were injured, two of them critically, in a bus accident yesterday in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the governor of South Sinai said.
The tourists were travelling on a bus owned by a local tour company near Saint Catherine’s monastery in central Sinai when their bus overturned and caught fire, medical and security sources said.
Agencies
