Saudi officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Mohammed al-Nimr, the sheikh’s brother, said people planned to hold a funeral Thursday for the cleric, though Saudi authorities already buried his corpse in an undisclosed cemetery.
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He will also have talks with the Pakistani leadership on different aspects of bilateral relations and regional and global issues of mutual interest.
Djibouti today cut its diplomatic relations with Iran in solidarity with Saudi Arabia.
Iran on Thursday said Saudi warplanes had attacked its embassy in Yemen’s capital, a development that would exacerbate tensions between the major Shi’ite and Sunni powers in the region, and Riyadh said it would investigate the accusation. In a statement on Tuesday, the Foreign Office said providing security to diplomatic staff and mission is the responsibility of the state and that hostile forces could try to take advantage of the differences of the Muslim Ummah. (Egypt also vocalized its support for Saudi Arabia, though Cairo already severed ties with Tehran in 1989.) Other Sunni Gulf states, like Qatar and Oman, are trying to stay out of the dispute.
Ellwood said escalating tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, one of Britain’s closest military allies in the Middle East with which it does billions of dollars worth of business every year, were “deeply concerning”.
Riyadh cut ties with Teheran in response, a move followed by several of its Sunni Arab allies including Bahrain and Sudan. “This has complicated it even more”, Richard Murphy, the former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Syria, told Al Jazeera.
Zarif, meanwhile, blamed Saudi Arabia for exacerbating the situation. President Hassan Rouhani yesterday condemned both the Saudi government for executing Nimr, and the attack on the Saudi missions. And Iran’s other go-to leverage – cutting off oil and gas exports or flooding the market – is ineffective against mega-producer Saudi Arabia, which is already pumping without restraint in this global market of low oil prices.
In eastern Saudi Arabia, the home of al-Nimr and much of the kingdom’s roughly 10 to 15 percent Shiite population, three days of mourning over his death ended Wednesday night.
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Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who leads his divided country with a Shia-dominated govenrment, has expressed “intense shock” at the execution of Nimr, condemning it as human rights violation. “About my brother, we were hoping to end it in a political way rather than in blood”.
