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WASHINGTON: Likening Iran’s leader to Adolf Hitler, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince warned in a US television interview that if Tehran gets a nuclear weapon, his country will follow suit.
“Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible,” Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said in an excerpt of the interview that aired Thursday on CBS This Morning.
The 32-year-old prince said he has referred to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as ‘the new Hitler’ because ‘he wants to expand’. “He wants to create his own project in the Middle East, very much like Hitler who wanted to expand at the time,” he said. “Many countries around the world and in Europe did not realise how dangerous Hitler was until what happened, happened. I don’t want to see the same events happening in the Middle East.”
The interview is scheduled to run on CBS’s 60 Minutes show on Sunday, two days before the crown prince’s scheduled White House meeting with US President Donald Trump.
His comments come amid concerns over nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and just days after the kingdom put an atomic energy programme on a fast track.
