The parents of a 24-year-old Indian businessman were "furious" after he named himself "king" of a 770-square-mile swath of uninhabited desert between Egypt and Sudan, The Times of India reports. His claim is also not sitting well with someone else: the area's other self-proclaimed king.
The region, called Bir Tawil, has been officially unclaimed since 1902, and is the largest habitable region of Earth to not belong to any one country. The businessman, Suyash Dixit, reportedly decided to take it as his own during a trip to Cairo for a software developers' conference. "There is no road, but it was not a difficult trip, although I was afraid of being abducted by terrorists," he told The Times of India.
But a different king of Bir Tawil had a bone to pick with Dixit's story:
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Virginia farmer Jeremiah Heaton claimed Bir Tawil as "the Kingdom of North Sudan" on Facebook in 2014, and named his daughter as princess. Heaton also says he planted a flag in the region, and he is none too happy about Dixit's claim that he sowed "sunflower seeds [in Bir Tawil], which is a traditional way to claim ownership of land."
Dixit told The Times of India that his parents finally came around to his kingship "as I made my father the president of the kingdom." But he might fall from their good graces once again if they learn he made the whole thing up. Read more about attempts to claim Bir Tawil at The Times of India and Al Jazeera.
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