UN Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon on Wednesday announced that he is sending senior UN officials to Egypt and Tunisia, the two countries rocked by mass protests over the past weeks.

The secretary-general made the announcement in his remarks to reporters after he cut short his scheduled trip to Los Angles to address the latest developments in North Africa and the Middle East.

“Tomorrow, I will dispatch our Undersecretary-General for Political Affairs, Lynn Pascoe, to Egypt,” Ban said. “He will be accompanied by Ms. Rima Khalaf, executive secretary of the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), as well as colleagues from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Department of Political Affairs.”

The secretary-general said that shortly before he spoke to the press, he convened a meeting of his senior advisers on Libya and the broader situation in the region and talked on the phone with the secretary-general of the League of Arab States, Amr Moussa.