Riyadh: Saudi Arabia's Prince Saud al-Faisal, who was the world's longest-serving foreign minister with 40 years in the post until his retirement this year, has died, the ministry spokesman said today. He was 75.

The tall, stately Prince Saud was a fixture of Mideast diplomacy, representing the oil-rich Gulf powerhouse as it wielded its influence in crisis after crisis shaking the region from Lebanon's civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, through multiple rounds of Arab-Israeli peace efforts, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War, al-Qaida's 9/11 attacks in the United States, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to the current day's tensions between the Gulf and Iran, Arab Spring uprisings, Syrian civil war and the spread of Islamic State group extremists.