Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will arrive in Palermo on Monday to attend a mini-summit on Libya's security being held on the sidelines of a two-day international conference on the conflict-wracked country, Sisi's office said in a statement.
Sisi's attendance at the Palermo mini-summit follows an invitation by Italy's prime minister Giuseppe Conte, according to the statement.
Besides Sisi, Libya's powerful eastern military leader Khalifa Haftar, Russian premier Dimitri Medvedev, Conte and the presidents of Tunisia, Chad and Niger are due take part in the mini-summit, 'The Address' website, which is close to Haftar, said on Monday.
'The Address' cited sources as saying Hafar would not participate in the main conference in Palermo, in which many of Libya's other main political factions are taking part together with key international players.
The two-day conference is seen as a symbol of Italy's determination to regain control of diplomatic initiatives on Libya in an effort to reunite the country’s institutions and find a new path to elections that a previous French-convened conference failed to achieve.
France's president Emmanuel Macron, convened a surprise summit in Paris in May in a bid to push for Libyan elections on 10 December - a date which is now widely seen as unrealistic.
In a briefing to the UN Security Council on Thursday, special envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame set a new time table for elections, saying the process should start in the Spring after a national conference in early 2019 to ponder the country's ongoing turmoil.
