Iran’s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi will pay an official visit to Egypt to hold talks with Egyptian officials on bilateral relations and the regional developments.

An Iranian Foreign Ministry official said on Sunday that Salehi is scheduled to travel to Egypt on January 9, which began on Saturday.

The talks will mainly focus on the issues of Palestine and the crisis in Syria.

The Iranian official also stated that the visit would take place at the invitation of Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohammed Kamel Amr. It will be Salehi’s second visit to Cairo since Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi took office in June 2012. He was in Cairo in mid-September for a meeting of the contact group on Syria.


During an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in the Saudi city of Mecca in mid-August 2012, the Egyptian president put forward a proposal for the establishment of a contact group, comprising Iran, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to help resolve the crisis in Syria.

Salehi left Tehran for Benin on Saturday on a tour of African countries, which will also take him to Ghana and Burkina Faso.

Iran severed ties with Egypt after Cairo signed the 1978 Camp David Accords with the Israeli regime and offered asylum to Iran’s deposed monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

However, the Egyptian revolution in 2011, which led to the ouster of former dictator Hosni Mubarak, brought about a thaw in the ties between Tehran and Cairo.
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