Saudi Arabia demanded on Thursday that the U.S. State Department retract a claim that Saudi King Abdullah met Israeli President Shimon Peres last year. Undersecretary William Burns had told a conference on U.S.-Saudi relations in Washington this week that the two spoke on the sidelines of a United Nations conference on dialogue among world religions in New York in November.
According to a statement from an "official source" on the kingdom's SPA news agency, "The comments by the State Department undersecretary are absolutely baseless and made up."