Riyadh: King Salman of Saudi Arabia arrived at a planned red Sea megacity to “rest and recover,” state media said Thursday, after the 84-year-old leader underwent surgery on the gallbladder.
The kingdom has sought to quell hypotheses about the fitness of the aging monarch, who has led the Arab world’s oil economy and export since 2015.
“The custodian of the two sacred mosques, King Salman, has arrived at NEOM, where he will spend time resting and recovering,” the official Saudi news firm said in a statement.
State television showed the king standing on an escalator descending from a plane and later arriving in a convoy of cars at what appeared to be a royal palace in NEOM, an area in the kingdom’s northwest that is currently under development.
The king left King Faisal Hospital in Riyadh on 30 July 10 days after laparoscopic surgery to remove his gallbladder, according to the royal court.
A video broadcast through state media, intended to dispel rumors about the king’s health, showed him presiding over a virtual assembly of closets from the hospital.
It is up to the kingdom to account for the monarch’s fitness.
In 2017, Saudi Arabia rejected reports and hypothesized that the king planned to abdicate in favor of his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The royal circle of Saudi relatives historically spends the summer in Morocco and other European destinations.
The $500 billion NEOM, to be built from scratch along the kingdom’s picturesque west coast, went through a rare revolt this year after a tribe member shot dead it through security forces.
The tribe member had refused to cede his land for the project.
During the king’s reign, Saudi Arabia introduced ambitious economic reforms to a post-oil era and granted more rights to women, and also pursued a more assertive foreign policy.
The now reigning monarch king in the Gulf will be recently hospitalized, after the 91-year-old emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, amid the double regional crisis of the coronavirus pandemic and falling crude oil prices.
Dear reader,
This segment is about life in the United Arab Emirates and data you cannot live without.
Sign up to read and complete gulfnews.com