Insight into Post journalist's death at Saudi hands
By David Ignatius / The Washington Post
At 1:14 on the afternoon of Oct. 2, 2018, a special-operations team waiting for Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul was told he had arrived. Just 25 minutes later, the Washington Post contributing columnist was dead, and a noise that Turkish authorities later described as a bone saw could be heard.
A year after Khashoggi’s killing, Saudi Arabia still hasn’t provided a clear explanation of what happened. But Saudi, U.S. and European sources, amplifying a June report by U.N. investigator Agnes Callamard, helped reconstruct the events leading to the shocking murder of Khashoggi, my colleague and friend.
The Saudi prosecution of this crime remains “episodic, haphazard and ad hoc,” a State Department official told me, but most of the facts are hiding in plain sight. This is a murder story that hasn’t died for a simple reason: It describes a macabre plot by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saud al-Qahtani, his media and covert-operations adviser in the royal court, to silence a brave critic.
MBS, as the crown prince is known, has offered a general statement of responsibility. “It happened under my watch. I get all the responsibility, because it happened under my watch,” he told Martin Smith of PBS in a December interview that was released last week. He gave a similar interview to CBS’s “60 Minutes” that was broadcast Sunday.
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