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Syria blocks distribution of Saudi-owned daily

Syria is blocking distribution of the Saudi-owned pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, the paper's Beirut bureau chief Zuhair Qusaybati told AFP on Thursday.

"The censorship authorities at the information ministry in Damascus asked Al-Hayat's bureau in the Syrian capital on Monday to stop sending its issues to the country until further notice," Qusaybati told AFP.

He said that no explanation had been given for the decision.

The daily is published in London and printed in a number of Arab capitals including Beirut, Cairo, and Riyadh.

In Syria, its distribution has long been subject to advance censorship and a number of issues have been withheld from newsstands because of their contents.

Relations between Damascus and Riyadh have been tense since the February 2005 assassination of Lebanese former premier Rafiq Hariri, a close Saudi ally, in a bombing widely blamed on Syria.

The ban on Al-Hayat's distribution in Syria came hot on the heels of a bomb blast which killed 17 people in Damascus on Saturday, the deadliest attack in the Syrian capital in more than a decade.

The Syrian official media have since repeatedly complained that the Saudi authorities did not condemn the bombing more vocally.