Five years after the murder of our contributor Jamal Khashoggi by a hit squad sent from Saudi Arabia, there has been no closure — not for us, not for his family and friends, and not for all those in the Arab world who would benefit from his vision of more openness and democracy in governance. Closure means finally getting the truth and holding to account Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who dispatched the killers, and everyone else involved.
On Oct. 2, 2018, Khashoggi, 59, a permanent resident of the United States, was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul by a promise he would be issued certain papers he needed to be allowed to marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. He entered the consulate and never came out. Inside, a Saudi team suffocated him and dismembered his body with a bone saw. The 15-member death squad included seven members of the crown prince’s elite personal protective detail and others from the Saudi Center for Studies and Media Affairs, led by Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser to the crown prince.
When their dirty work was done, they slipped out of Turkey. To this day, the Saudis have not said what they did with the body, thus denying Khashoggi’s family, friends and supporters a chance to give him a proper and dignified burial.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded that the crown prince approved a mission to “to capture or kill” Khashoggi. But what were the precise orders, and from whom? As a U.S. intelligence report put it in 2021, “Although Saudi officials had pre-planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi, we do not know how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him.” The public still doesn’t know.
The Saudi trials after the murder were a “mockery” of justice, as Ms. Cengiz put it. In December 2019, the Riyadh Criminal Court sentenced five people to death for the killing; three others received sentences totaling 24 years. Three people were found not guilty, including Saudi Arabia’s former deputy intelligence chief, Ahmad al-Asiri, whom U.S. intelligence identified as one of those involved. Mr. Qahtani was investigated by the Saudi public prosecution but not charged. In September 2020, the five had their death sentences commuted to 20 years in prison. The Saudi authorities said the case was closed.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The crown prince now refers to the crime as if some remote third party is responsible. In an interview with Fox News broadcast Sept. 20, he called the murder a “mistake.” He added, “Also, we try to reform the security system to be sure that these kind of mistakes doesn’t happen again, and we can see in the past five years nothing of those things happened. It’s not part of what Saudi Arabia do.”
“Reform?” Last August, Saudi Arabia sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a mother of two, to 34 years in prison, later modified to 27 years, for a social media post. She was charged with “supporting those who seek to disrupt the public order” for speaking in favor of women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and other prisoners of conscience. In a case in July, Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a retired teacher, was sentenced to death for making remarks critical of the Saudi royal family on social media. He had been charged under a counterterrorism law for “describing the King or the Crown Prince in a way that undermines religion or justice” and for supporting a “terrorist ideology.”
Asked on Fox News about the death sentence, MBS replied, “We are not happy with that. We are ashamed of that. But [under] the jury system, [you] have to follow the laws, and I cannot tell a judge, ‘Do that and ignore the law,’ because … that’s against the rule of law. But do we have bad laws? Yes. Are we changing that? Yes.” Actually, Mr. Ghamdi was sentenced to death under a 2017 counterterrorism law that the crown prince put into place. This is his dictatorship.
In a meeting with MBS in Jeddah on July 15, 2022, President Biden raised the Khashoggi murder, and “received commitments with respect to reforms and institutional safeguards in place to guard against any such conduct in the future,” according to a White House statement at the time. After Mr. Biden departed, Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Court handed down a series of draconian prison sentences against the regime’s critics. In August, the court sentenced 18-year-old secondary school student Manal al-Gafiri to 18 years in jail and a travel ban of the same length for tweeting in support of prisoners of conscience. Meanwhile, Saudi border guards have killed hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemeni-Saudi border. And now the crown prince is negotiating with the Biden administration on a defense pact — and establishment of a civilian nuclear power plant on Saudi territory — in exchange for full recognition of Israel.
No one should accept the Saudi whitewash. MBS stole Jamal Khashoggi from his family, friends and colleagues; escaped accountability for his murder; and continues to torment Saudis who dissent.