Qatar: Talks with Saudi Arabia stopped without notice

Qatar’s Foreign Minister has said that talks with Saudi Arabia stopped in January without any prior notice, Al Jazeera reported on Wednesday. Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani made his comment at the Munich Security Conference.

“It has been almost three years,” he said. “We were not the perpetrators and are open to any offer to resolve this problem.”

Sheikh Mohammed is also Qatar’s deputy prime minister. “Unfortunately,” he added, “the efforts to solve the issue did not succeed and were suspended at the beginning of January; Qatar is not responsible for this.”

These remarks confirmed reports that such efforts started in early December with Qatar’s participation in a Gulf summit in Riyadh. At the time, Saudi Arabia hailed the Qatari participation.

In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain, along with Egypt, announced that they were cutting political, trade and transport ties with Qatar, claiming that it supports terrorist groups. They imposed a land, air and sea blockade which has more or less been in place ever since.

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