NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Britain’s Princess Anne cast aside the controversy surrounding her nephew Prince Harry and carried on with her royal duties Wednesday by visiting British soldiers serving with a United Nations peacekeeping force on ethnically divided Cyprus.
The princess, who is King Charles III’s sister and the only daughter of the late Queen Elizabeth II, plans to meet with members of the Royal Logistic Corps, the army unit of which she serves as colonel-in-chief, to recognize their service to one of the U.N.’s longest-serving peacekeeping forces.
The peacekeepers invited Anne to visit and planned to lead her on a tour of a section of the U.N.-controlled buffer zone that separates the island nation’s breakaway Turkish Cypriot north from the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot south.
The princess will also lay a wreath at a cemetery in the buffer zone where many Commonwealth soldiers who died in conflicts including both world wars are buried
The visit came the day after Prince Harry’s ghostwritten memoir “Spare” went on sale around the world. The book exposes bitter divides inside the House of Windsor.
Harry, who spent a decade in the British army, claims his relatives were unwelcoming to his wife, Meghan, and accuses members of the royal family, including his stepmother Camilla, of leaking stories to the media to burnish their own reputations.