Eritrean foreign minister dies of heart attack

“We will have three days of national mourning starting tomorrow,” Information Minister Ali Abdu Ahmed told Reuters, confirming his colleague’s death.

Said’s main task had been to handle the tiny Red Sea state’s tricky relations with giant neighbour Ethiopia.

The two Horn of Africa neighbours, who lost 70,000 people in a 1998-2000 border war, have been in political deadlock since 2002, when Ethiopia refused to accept a demarcation decision by an independent boundary commission.