Saudi Envoy to Britain Hails Suicide Bombers in Verse

CAIRO — The Saudi ambassador to Britain, a well-known poet in the Arab world, has praised Palestinian suicide bombers and criticized the United States in a poem published in a London-based newspaper.

“You died to honor God’s word,” Ghazi Algosaibi wrote in “The Martyrs,” a short poem on the front page of the Saudi-owned Arabic daily Al Hayat on Saturday.

The poem praised Hayat Akhras, an 18-year-old Palestinian who blew herself up in a Jerusalem supermarket, killing two Israelis and wounding 25 on March 29, the same day Israeli troops began their incursion into the West Bank to crush Palestinian militias behind a wave of attacks.

“Tell Hayat, the bride of loftiness . . . She embraced death with a smile while the leaders are running away from death. Doors of heaven are opened for her,” wrote Algosaibi, the ambassador in London for more than a decade.