Ahmadinejad Visits Egypt, Signaling Realignment

[Purveyor]

CAIRO — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s historic three-day trip to Egypt, the first in three decades by an Iranian leader, started pleasantly enough on Tuesday.

Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, greeted Mr. Ahmadinejad with a broad smile during a red-carpet ceremony at a Cairo airport. The two talked about the crisis in Syria and how to improve the relationship between their own countries, which has been in a deep freeze since the Iranian revolution in 1979.

“Egypt is a very important country in the region and the Islamic Republic of Iran believes it is one of the heavyweights in the Middle East,” Iran’s foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Iran’s state-run Islamic Republic News Agency on Tuesday. “We are ready to further strengthen ties.”

Then things got testy.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/world/middleeast/irans-president-visits-egypt-in-sign-of-thaw.html#h[]