Iranian president Hassan Rouhani received an invitation late on Monday from Egypt's interim leader Adly Mansour to attend the inauguration of Egypt's upcoming president Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi. According to the Tehran-based Fares news agency, the invitation was handed in to the Iranian Chief-of-Staff Mohamed Nahavandian, who expressed his hope "that the democratic process in Egypt will reflect the will of the people". He further affirmed the importance of historic and cultural ties between Egypt and Iran, stressing the need for communication between them. Egypt's official ties with Iran were broken off in 1980, a year after Iran's Islamic revolution and Egypt's peace agreement with Israel. Egypt-Iran relations had begun to thaw following ousted president Mohamed Morsi's rise to power, when Morsi and then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad exchanged visits and spoke of a new phase in bilateral relations. Iran protested Morsi's ouster last year and has described the bloody dispersal of his loyalists in August 2012 as "a massacre". Hundreds were killed in the dispersal. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/102854.aspx
