TEHRAN -- Iran said on Tuesday its ambassador to Yemen has passed away of COVID-19 after being repatriated last week, blaming Saudi Arabia for delaying his departure from the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
Saudi Arabia and Iraq helped to transfer Ambassador Hasan Irloo on board an Iraqi plane, according to a Yemeni spokesman.
“We had to try for a few days to get permission...to send a plane from Iran or another country to take him quickly to a well-equipped hospital in Iran, but unfortunately the Saudi side decided too late and some Saudi bodies procrastinated,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian said.
Saudi Arabia has imposed a sea and air blockade on Sanaa and major Yemeni port as part of its devastating war on the most impoverished Arab nation for more than six years.
A report by the Wall Street Journal newspaper, citing regional officials, said Riyadh had asked the Yemenis to release a number of Saudi prisoners held by the country’s forces in exchange for allowing Irloo’s transfer.
Saudi Arabia and Iran launched direct talks this year at a time when the remaining signatories of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran have been meeting in Vienna to bring the U.S. back to compliance and remove its sanctions.
“We will formally voice our protest in accordance with international conventions, and we hope that Yemen will be able to move soon... towards a political solution and get out of this war and severe humanitarian siege,” Amir-Abdollahian said.
“We have lost a great friend,” Yemen’s deputy foreign minister Hussein al-Ezzi based in Sanaa said on Twitter.
Irloo, 63, was named last year as Iran’s ambassador to Yemen. Iran’s foreign ministry said Irloo was a veteran of the eight-year Iraqi war on Iran in the 1980s and had sustained injuries from chemical weapons used by former dictator Saddam Hussein’s forces.
He passed away early Tuesday “despite undergoing all stages of treatment to improve his condition”, Khatibzadeh said.
The Wall Street Journal had claimed on Friday that the envoy showed no signs of COVID-19, and quoted anonymous officials from the Mideast and Western officials as saying that the ambassador was recalled to Tehran over “strains with the Houthi movement”.
Ibrahim al-Dailami, Yemen’s ambassador to Tehran, dismissed the report in an interview with IRNA published on Sunday.
“We should not respond to such nonsense, which the American media publish from time to time in order to take advantage of the [dire situation] and poison the atmosphere,” Dailami said, adding that relations between Tehran and Sana’a were “developing rapidly.”
Irloo officially began his diplomatic mission to Yemen in November 2020, and was put on a U.S. sanctions list a month later by former president Donald Trump.