Al-Arab news channel closes

Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal’s Al-Arab news channel has closed, six years after news of its “imminent” launch, media reports revealed yesterday.

Staff at the station have been made redundant with settlement procedures due to begin soon.

In the six years since it was announced that the channel would launch, it suffered a series of delays, finally broadcasting from the Bahraini capital Manama in February 2015 only to be closed within hours for airing an interview with the main opposition party in Bahrain.

The channel attributed the disrupted broadcast at the time in a post on its Twitter account to “technical and administrative reasons”.