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Saudi king, Iran’s Ahmadinejad discuss Mideast situation in rare call

12 October 2010 22:49 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad discussed Tuesday the current situation in the Middle East in a rare phone call between the leaders of the two rival regional powerhouses, APA reports quoting Xinhua News Agency.
Official Saudi SPA news agency said that the Saudi monarch received a call from the Iranian leader, during which they conferred over bilateral relations and the overall situation in the region. The report gave no further details on the conversation.
The call came one day ahead of a much-anticipated visit by Ahmadinjead to Lebanon and amid tensions over the formation of Iraq’s government, deadlocked seven months after parliamentary elections.
Tensions have been high in Lebanon as Iranian-backed Shiite group Hezbollah has been in a standoff with Saudi-backed Prime Minister Saad Hariri over a probe into the murder of former prime minister - and Saad’s father - Rafiq Hariri.
Reports said that the international tribunal is set to indict some members of the Shiite group over the 2005 murder, fueling the row between the two political blocs in the country.
The call also came two days after Riyadh received leader of Iraqia list Iyad Allawi, the main rival of outgoing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki backed by Iran to win a second term in office.
The main Shiite bloc in the Iraqi parliament, the National Alliance, picked Maliki as a candidate for the top post, in a bid to end a month-long political deadlock after March 7 parliamentary elections produced no outright winner.
Allawi’s Iraqia bloc, which won 91 seats, just two seats more than Maliki’s bloc in Iraq’s 325-seat parliament, said it would not recognize the Shiite National Alliance.