Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) (AFP) – A global Muslim body on Thursday condemned the attacks on Saudi missions in Iran earlier this month and denounced Tehran’s regional “interference”.
Foreign ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, in a statement, said it “condemns the aggressions against the missions of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Tehran and Mashhad”.
The statement followed an extraordinary meeting requested by Saudi Arabia after protesters in Iran burned Riyadh’s embassy in Tehran and a consulate in the second city of Mashhad.
Such “aggressions” contravene international law as well as the OIC charter, said the communique, which member state Iran rejected.
Sunni Saudi Arabia and some of its allies cut diplomatic ties with Shiite Iran as a result of the violence against its missions.
The 57-member OIC denounced “Iran’s interference in the internal affairs of the states of the region and other member states (including Bahrain, Yemen and Syria and Somalia) and its continued support for terrorism”.
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi attended the meeting but his country “declared its rejection of the communique,” the document said.
It added that Lebanon also “distances itself” from the meeting’s final statement.
The OIC calls itself the collective voice of the Muslim world.

Iranian mobs set fire to the Saudi Embassy in Tehran during a demonstration

The final communique underscored the “importance of reinforcing relations of good neighbourliness” among members.
Iran sacked a senior security official over his failure to stop the attack on Riyadh’s embassy, while Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei on Wednesday said the attack was against Islam.

Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir

But Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir charged at Thursday’s meeting that Iran respects neither Islam nor the charter of the OIC.
“The importance of this meeting is in the fact that this aggression is not the first but only a part of a series of continuous attacks that diplomatic missions have been subjected to in Iran for 35 years,” Jubeir said.
“It is important to point out that the aggression against the kingdom’s missions comes as part of Iran’s aggressive policies and its continuous interference in the internal issues of the countries in the region”.