The US State Department has issued a statement making it clear that there was no bilateral meeting between King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and Shimon Peres, Israeli President, on the sidelines of the United Nations Conference for Interfaith Dialogue last November. The statement follows a denial issued by a Saudi official source on Thursday and a demand that the State Department issue a clarification on the “false, baseless and untrue” claim, reportedly made by US Undersecretary for Political Affairs William Burns, that the King had greeted Peres. US State Department spokesman Robert Wood said: “The only thing that I can say is that during that conference there were a number of world leaders including King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, former US president George W. Bush and Israeli President Shimon Peres. They all participated in the session of the conference and they attended the dinner hosted by the secretary general of the United Nations and the meeting.” In a press briefing on Thursday, Wood said, “What I understood was that there was no bilateral meeting between the two (the King and Peres).” The Saudi official source, quoted by the SPA news agency, had said that the State Department must “deny the claim and provide clarification for the reasons behind such fabrication that does not serve the relations between the two friendly countries.”
