MONACO, April 15: Kings, queens and presidents bade farewell to Monaco’s Prince Rainier on Friday at a funeral service in the cathedral where he married former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly and will be laid to rest beside her. Eight palace guards slowly carried Rainier’s coffin, draped in Monaco’s red and white flag, from the royal palace to the steps of the cathedral where he wed Princess Grace in 1956 and where she was buried after she died in a car crash in 1982.
Six other officers then carried the coffin into the cathedral, where family members lit candles to Rainier, who died on April 6 at the age of 81 of lung, heart and kidney problems.
Princesses Caroline and Stephanie wept openly as they walked behind the coffin alongside their brother Prince Albert, who will succeed his father as monarch.
French President Jacques Chirac and King Juan Carlos of Spain sat beside each other in the cathedral at a ceremony attended by about 60 kings, queens and princes, presidents and their representatives.
“In this same cathedral 49 years ago, almost to the day, he married her Royal Highness Princess Grace who disappeared from our view too soon,” Bernard Barsi, the archbishop of Monaco, said in a homily.
“With the princess he made an exceptional couple, united by heart and mind,” he said of the US-born actress whom Prince Rainier said he always missed after her death.—ReutersPalestinian fires at Israelis in Golan
JERUSALEM, April 15: A Palestinian entered the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria and fired on Israeli troops on Friday in a rare flare-up on the border that the Jewish state blamed on Damascus. The army said it captured the lone attacker, a 21-year-old militant belonging to Fatah, the Palestinians’ ruling faction, and that he told interrogators he had planned to abduct an Israeli soldier and take him back to Syria.
No casualties were reported, but media reports said the army had launched an inquiry into how the man managed to breach defences along the heavily fortified border.
Israel, which recently accused Syria of trying to disrupt an Israeli-Palestinian truce, called the incident a “grave violation” of UN-brokered security arrangements set up in the area after the 1973 Middle East war.
“The Syrians should not be allowing armed terrorists to cross the border,” an Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said.
