Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon on Sunday denied apologising to a senior Saudi diplomat before a rare public handshake between officials of the two states.
Prince Turki al-Faisal had said he shook hands with Ayalon at a security conference in Munich, but only after the Israeli apologised for actions Turki objected to - giving Turkey's ambassador a public dressing down.
However, Ayalon said it was not true he said sorry to Turki. "Everyone who was present at the conference knows there was no apology from the deputy minister to the Saudi prince," said a statement from his office.
"To those who did not take part in the conference we suggest they check the video recordings to verify what really happened." Earlier, Saudi Arabia's former intelligence chief and ex-ambassador to the United States said the handshake came after Ayalon publicly reprimanded him for not sitting together on a panel at the annual international security conference.
"I objected to sitting on the same panel with him not because he is the deputy minister of foreign affairs of Israel but because of his boorish conduct with the Turkish ambassador to Israel Ahmet Oguz Celikkol," Turki said. In January Ayalon made a show of publicly humiliating Celikkol to demonstrate Israeli displeasure over a Turkish television show critical of the Jewish state.
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