Suhel Ajaz Khan, presently India’s ambassador to the Republic of Lebanon, has been appointed as the next envoy to Saudi Arabia.
A member of the 1997 batch of the Indian Foreign Service, Khan has spent much of his diplomatic career in the Middle East and can speak Arabic. This will be Khan’s third stint in Saudi Arabia. He served a stint in Jeddah as Consul at the Consulate-General of India in that city. He was also deputy chief of mission in Riyadh between 2017 and 2019 and held the personal rank of ambassador. He was subsequently appointed India’s ambassador in Beirut in 2019.
Khan has previously served in various capacities at Indian missions in Egypt, Syria and Pakistan. At the Ministry of External Affairs, Khan was deputy secretary in the West Asia and North Africa Division.
Outside of the Middle East, Khan also served in Vienna where he was deputy chief of mission of India’s permanent mission there.
“Between 2013 and 2017 he was part of the Indian delegations to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization) and the UNCOPUOS (United Nations Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space) meetings. He also served as Rapporteur of the Programme and Budget Committee of the IAEA in 2015, G-77 Coordinator for the UNIDO matters in 2015 and as Governing Body representative on the Staff Pension Committee of the UNIDO from 2016-2017. He was also Head of the Indian Delegation to the Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons in December 2014 at Vienna,” according to the website of the Embassy of India, Beirut,” an official release said.
Source : LiveMint