JERUSALEM: Israel’s Minister of Energy Silvan Shalom travels to the United Arab Emirates to attend a conference on renewable energy, a spokesman said.
Shalom, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, will head a delegation to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s conference in Abu Dhabi, the spokesman said.
The conference is due to open today and the minister returns home on Monday, he added.
Israel has quietly been seeking the alliance of Gulf monarchies, which like the Jewish state are concerned over Iran’s rising regional power.
In May daily newspaper Haaretz revealed Israel had allocated a budget for a diplomatic mission in one of the Persian Gulf states.
In January 2010 Hamas military commander Mahmud Al Mabhuh was found dead in a Dubai hotel room, in what investigators in the UAE believe was an assassination carried out by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Iran summons UAE official
TEHRAN: Iran summoned a UAE diplomat in Tehran over the “suspicious” death in custody of an Iranian in the Gulf state, media reported yesterday.
“The foreign ministry is seriously following up on the case of Iranian citizen Ali Hosseini, who lost his life while he was detained by UAE security forces,” Fars news agency quoted ministry spokeswoman Marzieh Afkham as saying.
“In the absence of a UAE ambassador to Tehran, we immediately summoned the embassy’s official to express Iran’s strong objection,” she said, adding that Hosseini had been arrested with two other Iranians in the past two weeks.
Iranian experts will soon travel to the UAE to investigate the reasons of Hosseini’s death, Afkham said.
The report said the three men were arrested on suspicion of kidnapping a British-Iranian citizen named Abba Yazdi, who media reports said went missing in Dubai on June 25.
In November, Afkham said any reports connecting Iran with the “alleged (role) of kidnapping or murdering him are ridiculous and sheer lies.”AFP
