Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, whose death was announced on Saturday, was the oil kingpin’s defence chief for nearly half a century but was also renowned for his extravagant living and largesse. A half-brother of King Abdullah, he served as deputy prime minister, and defence and aviation minister from 1962, and was famed among Saudis for his regular, well-publicised acts of largesse, but also for reports that he had benefited massively from government arms purchases.
Prince Sultan had battled colon cancer since 2004, going to Switzerland and the United States to seek treatment. His long illness and absences abroad held up important government decisions while raising questions about how the monarchy would take shape in the next generation of the Al-Saud family.
On March 27, 2009, Prince Sultan’s brother Prince Nayef, the interior minister, was named second deputy prime minister in a bid to remove any question marks about the succession in the face of his declining health.
With his six brothers, Sultan made up the powerful Sudairi Seven faction of sons of king Abdul Aziz, founder of modern Saudi Arabia — all half-brothers of King Abdullah — by a favourite wife, Princess Hassa al-Sudairi.
Sultan was educated in the royal court and was clearly on the rise when named governor of Riyadh in 1947. Over the next decade he served as agriculture minister and then communications minister.
King Faisal named him to the defence portfolio in 1962, and he became one of a handful of key princes, including Abdullah and Sultan’s full brothers Prince Nayef and Prince Salman, who have run Saudi Arabia for four decades.
In 1982, his full brother King Fahd appointed Sultan second deputy prime minister, making him second in line for succession after then-crown prince Abdullah. Robert Lacey, author of “The Kingdom”, a book on the Al-Saud dynasty, described the tall and stocky Sultan as someone who “works and plays hard.”
According to US-based website Datarabia and other sources, he had seven wives and 37 children, many of whom he placed in key jobs in the bureaucracy, including the defence ministry. Prince Sultan was renowned for the lavish patronage he doled out to the kingdom’s tribes, civil servants, soldiers, and civic and religious groups. He took lengthy holidays with a huge entourage in his palace in the Moroccan resort of Agadir. He also stood out among the owners of Mediterranean superyachts, with his 457 foot, 82-room Al-Salamah, estimated to cost 200 million dollars, ranked the world’s largest private yacht by Power and Motoryacht magazine in 2008. As defence and aviation minister, and the government’s inspector general, Sultan oversaw a major buildup of the kingdom’s armed forces and the national carrier Saudi Arabian Airlines.
He presided over a bloody military assault on the Grand Mosque in Mecca after it was seized by Islamic extremists in 1979. Although he at first resisted the idea of US troops mounting an attack from Saudi soil, his cooperation was essential in the US-led Desert Storm campaign to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991. The same was true in the US-led invasion of Iraq of 2003, when US air command operations, aircraft and some troops were based in the airbase south of Riyadh that bears his name.
The need for cancer treatment in the United States saw him leave Saudi Arabia for more than a year between 2008 and 2009, most of the time spent recuperating in Agadir. His absence, restricting some of the work of government, caused turmoil in royal circles and speculation that he would never resume his duties. But, though clearly physically debilitated, he resumed public duties after his return in December 2009, although observers said he could only work for a few hours each day.
