Jeddah: Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz underwent a “successful” operation in a local hospital to correct a back problem, the royal court announced in a communique disseminated by the official SPA news agency on Sunday.
“A surgery was performed on the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, at the National Guard’s King Abdulaziz Medical City in Riyadh on Saturday … where a loose ligament in the upper back was tightened,” the statement, carried on state television and the SPA news agency, said.
“With God’s help, the surgery ended at 0315 on Sunday morning … and thanks be to God it was successful,” it added in Arabic.
In October 2011, the Saudi king underwent a successful operation to tighten ligaments around his spine at the same medical center.
In addition, Abdullah was operated on in New York on Nov. 24, 2010, for a herniated disk and complications from a blood clot associated with it.
On Dec. 3 that same year, he underwent surgery again as part of his treatment to more firmly set his spinal disks, and in February 2010 he returned to Saudi Arabia after convalescing outside the kingdom for three months.
Abdullah has ruled Saudi Arabia since the death of his half-brother, King Fahd, on Aug. 1, 2005.
The current king named another half-brother, 76-year-old Prince Salman, crown prince last June after the death of Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz.
Unlike in European monarchies, the line of succession does not move directly from father to eldest son, but has moved down a line of brothers born to the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, who died in 1953.
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