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The move comes seven weeks after the oil-rich kingdom permitted fully immunised citizens to travel abroad
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The UAE is a key leisure destination for Saudis.
Saudi Arabia has suspended flights to the UAE, Ethiopia and Vietnam, including the neighbouring United Arab Emirates, to protect against “a mutated strain of the virus,” the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) has said.
Earlier, the oil-rich kingdom had permitted fully immunised citizens to travel abroad, after a ban on foreign trips that lasted more than a year.
The UAE announced last week it had recorded cases of the Delta variant and it has suspended flights to and from India.
The UAE is a key leisure destination for Saudis.
Flights to and from the UAE, alongside those to Ethiopia and Vietnam, were suspended from Sunday, an interior ministry official said, quoted by the SPA.
Saudi citizens and residents returning from these countries will be required to quarantine for 14 days, it added.
Citizens would be banned “from travelling directly or indirectly, without obtaining prior permission from… authorities”.
The decision was taken due to “the spread of a new mutated strain of the (Covid-19) virus”, it added, without explicitly mentioning the increasingly globally emergent Delta variant.
