PressTV reported that:

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz has ordered former deputy Defense Minister Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz be put under house arrest.

The monarch apparently issued the order after the country’s intelligence services detected suspicious activities by the officers within the ground forces who are close to the former defense minister, mirataljazeera.net reported.

The king ordered the house arrest from Morocco where he was on a visit. The monarch cut short the trip and flew home to deal with the issue.

The investigation was carried out by a committee comprising six different security agencies. It revealed that the officers, in cahoots with the prince and the former governor of the Eastern Province Mohammed bin Fahad bin Abdul Aziz, currently residing in the United States, were planning to stage a coup d’état.

The website also said that the former defense minister is suspected of having a role in the coup.

Prince Khaled was dismissed by royal decree on April 21, 2013. Prince Fahd Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Abdulrahman, who was commander of Saudi naval forces since 2002, succeeded him. [PressTV – June 16, 2013, titled “Saudi princes planned military coup”]

It is to be recalled that Prince Khaled bin Sultan made anti-Ethiopian remarks last February, in the Arab Water Council held in Cairo Egypt, in the context of opposing Ethiopia’s right to use the Nile waters. The Price was quoted as saying:

“the Ethiopian Renaissance dam…is for political plotting rather than for economic gain and constitutes a threat to Egyptian and Sudanese national security”.

“The [Grand Ethiopian] Renaissance dam has its capacity of flood waters reaching more than 70 billion cubic meters of water, and is located at an altitude of 700 meters and if it collapsed then Khartoum will drown completely and the impact will even reach the Aswan Dam”.

“Egypt is the most affected party from the Ethiopian Renaissance dam because they have no alternative water source compared to other Nile Basin countries and the establishment of the dam 12 kilometers from the Sudanese border is for political plotting rather than for economic gain and constitutes a threat to Egyptian and Sudanese national security”.

“There are fingers messing with water resources of Sudan and Egypt which are rooted in the mind and body of Ethiopia. They do not forsake an opportunity to harm Arabs without taking advantage of it”.

“The establishment of the dam leads to the transfer of water supply from the front of Lake Nasser to the Ethiopian plateau, which means full Ethiopian control of every drop of water, as well as [causing] an environmental imbalance stirring seismic activity in the region as a result of the massive water weight laden with silt withheld in front of the dam, estimated by experts at more than 63 billion tonnes”.

The government of Saudi formally denounced the hostile remarks in April and fired him from his Ministerial job later that month.

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Check the Ethio-Saudi diplomatic crisis archive for background info.

[Acknowledgements to Mulu Beyene (an assistant of this blog from Oslo, Norway) who kept a close watch on this Prince and alerted us almost all the developments since April.]