Somali president allowed to board plane after visa spat

April 23, 2009 (CAIRO) —A European airline company refused to allow Somali President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to board one of its planes over a visa issue.

The semi-official Al-Ahram daily from Egypt reported that Swiss Air informed the Somali head of state that neither he nor his entourage can fly to Europe because they do not have a visa permit.

The newspaper said that Ahmed managed to fly on KLM to Amsterdam and then to Belgium. It did not say how the visa spat was eventually resolved.

The Somali president is scheduled to attend a one-day donors’ conference in Brussels, where the European Commission has said it will pledge at least 60 million Euros ($78 million) to help boost security in war-torn Somalia.

Ahmed, elected last January, was in Cairo for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Somalia has had no effective central authority since the 1991 ouster of president Mohamed Siad Barre touched off a bloody cycle of clashes between rival factions

(ST)