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Yar’Adua Convalesces In Saudi Arabia
Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua was convalescing in a Saudi hospital yesterday after what his spokesman said earlier this week were “follow-up medical checks”, a hospital official said.
“He is still here but his family have all gone to Mecca for the hajj,” an official at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in the western city of Jeddah said.
The official, who declined to give his name, would not give any specifics on Yar’Adua’s condition.
On Wednesday, rumours spread in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia that Yar’Adua had slipped into a coma or had died while in Jeddah to visit the hospital.
It is his third trip to the Red Sea port in as many months, all believed to have involved hospital visits.
The condition of Yar’Adua, 58, is cloaked in an official veil of secrecy.
But he is widely believed to have a history of kidney-related disease for which he has previously received hospital treatment in both Germany and Saudi Arabia.
Yar’Adua was dogged by ill-health even during the election campaign that brought him to power in 2007.