German Minister To Help Clear Qatar Charges

Germany’s foreign minister says his country’s intelligence service will participate in efforts to clear up accusations by Arab neighbors that Qatar supports terror groups.

Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar and mediator Kuwait this week as the Saudis and others seek to isolate Qatar over its alleged support for extremists. Gabriel told Deutschlandfunk radio Thursday there was an agreement for Qatar to “open all its books” to Germany’s intelligence service “if we have questions about certain people or structures.” The minister said he no longer sees the risk of a military escalation in the standoff despite an angry reaction Wednesday from the four Arab nations to Qatar’s response to their demands. Gabriel said that, while the reaction sounded harsh, many demands were no longer mentioned.

Saudi accuses Qatar
Saudi Arabia, which is leading a four-country blockade of Gulf neighbour Qatar, on Thursday accused Doha of being behind over 23,000 Twitter accounts it blames for trying to stoke dissent in Saudi Arabia.

“We found over 23,000 Twitter accounts driven by Qatar, some of them linked to accounts calling for ‘revolution’ in Saudi Arabia,” Information Minister Awwad Saleh al-Awwad told AFP during a visit to Paris. They included the @mujtahidd account, which claims to have the inside track on the Saudi royal household and has over 1.8 million followers, he said.

The account, which has backed Qatar, claimed that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates had set out to overthrow Qatari Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani but decided against after coming under pressure from the United States, an ally of both Riyadh and Doha. Al-Awwad accused a London-based Saudi dissident, Saad al-Faqih, of being behind the account, “together with Qatar”.

While some of @mujtahidd’s claims have proven false, it reported the death of Saudi King Abdullah in 2015 a few hours before the news was officially announced. Some of the other accounts identified by Riyadh as being Qatari proxies were behind calls for protests by the jobless on April 21, he said.

In the end, there were no major demonstrations in Qatar, with police flooding the capital. Further calls for protests during the holy fasting month of Ramadan also went largely unheeded. “They failed,” al-Awwad declared. His remarks came as Saudi Arabia vowed to push on with its month-old boycott of Qatar after the emirate refused to meet a list of demands to end the diplomatic crisis. These include Doha ending support for the Muslim Brotherhood and closing its flagship broadcaster Al-Jazeera. Saudi Arabia and its supporters have severed air, sea and ground links with Qatar, cutting off vital routes for imports including food. Qatar has dismissed the demands as “unrealistic”.

Qatar maintains support
Qatar will continue to back international efforts aimed at combatting terrorism and fundamentalism in cooperation with its global allies, its Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani underlined on Thursday. After meeting Britain’s Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Defence Tobias Ellwood in London, he said that tackling terrorism represented a priority for national, regional and global security.

Last night, the minister met House of Lords and House of Commons members, with whom he discussed the tensions between Qatar and several Arab countries, underlining Qatar’s firm resolve in calls for dialogue. He also stressed the importance of boosting bilateral relations with Britain in the fields of energy, trade and mainitaining security and peace in the region. His Highness the Amir of Kuwait Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al- Sabah has been leading mediation efforts on the crisis in an effort to break the deadlock.

 

SOURCE : ARABTIMES

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