Plans to hold a Middle East peace summit at an Egyptian Red Sea resort are an "American plot", Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan charged Saturday.
The summit to be held at Sharm el-Sheikh within 48 hours was "the work of the United States and constitutes a new plot against the Arab nation," Ramadan told the official INA news agency.
The aim was to "undermine" the Arab summit set for October 21 and 22 in Cairo to debate the violence in Israel and the territories which has left more than 100 dead in two weeks, most of them Palestinians.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat agreed Saturday to attend the peace summit.
"It is an irresponsible attitude ... intended to put a brake on the courageous resistance to Zionist occupiers," Ramadan said.
Iraq has been invited to the Cairo meeting, although it was left out of the last Arab summit in 1996 in the aftermath of its 1990 invasion of Kuwait - BAGHDAD (AFP)
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