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WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush met with the Saudi foreign minister a day after a congressional hearing on reports of American children being abducted to Saudi Arabia, but Bush did not bring up the matter.
"The State Department is handling it," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday. "The president had a 20-minute meeting which focused on peace in the Mideast."
Assistant Secretary of State William Burns discussed the issue in his own meeting Wednesday with Prince Saud al-Faisal, Fleischer said.
Ethel Stowers said at House hearing Wednesday that her two grandchildren were kidnapped by their Saudi father in 1985 and taken to his home country.
According to State Department officials, Saudi courts almost always favor Saudi fathers in child custody cases involving non-Saudi mothers.
Fleischer said U.S. ability to influence such cases is minimal. "It involves laws of a sovereign nation that the United States cannot control," he said.
He also defended the president's lack of intervention with Saudi leaders on the Stowers case and on the wider problem, saying it was more appropriate coming from the State Department, which has an office dedicated to those sorts of problems.
"In each of these cases, it's a heartbreaking, difficult, difficult issue that the State Department works very hard on, in a very individual way, to do what's best for the interest of a child," Fleischer said.
