Prince Nayef named Saudi crown prince

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has appointed Interior Minister Prince Nayef as the new crown prince, the Royal Court said in a statement issued on Friday, signalling an orderly process of future succession in the world's largest oil exporter.

"We chose His Royal Highness Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz as crown prince," said the statement, read on state television and carried on the kingdom's news agency SPA soon after midnight.

It said Nayef, who is in his 70s, was appointed after King Abdullah took his choice to a royal family body called the Allegiance Council, set up in 2006 to make the process of succession in the conservative Islamic nation smoother and more orderly.

It was the first time the council had been involved in the appointment of a new crown prince, a move that analysts had said would help to regulate an opaque system of succession.

Crown Prince Sultan died of colon cancer in New York almost a week ago. He was also the kingdom's defence and aviation minister for nearly five decades. No replacements for these positions have yet been appointed.

As interior minister since 1975, a post to which he was reappointed in the Royal Court statement, Nayef has developed a reputation as a conservative with close ties to the Saudi religious establishment.

In recent years he has already run the kingdom on a day-to-day basis when King Abdullah and Prince Sultan were both absent. King Abdullah's recurrent back problem has caused him to go abroad for medical treatment.

Nayef, a half-brother of King Abdullah, was born around 1933 in Taif, the pretty mountain town where the royal court repaired each year to escape the stifling summer of the capital Riyadh and the second city Jeddah.

Growing up in the royal court of the 1930s and 1940s, Nayef is of the last generation of Saudis who knew the austere desert kingdom before the first flush of oil wealth changed it beyond all recognition.

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