A little more than a year after having exempted the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed Ben Salman, from all responsibility in the assassination of the journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the justice of the kingdom whitewashed, Friday December 23, the two members of his entourage , suspected of having supervised the operation, carried out in October 2018, in Istanbul (Turkey).
General Ahmed Al-Assiri, number two in Saudi intelligence, former spokesman for the Arab coalition intervening militarily in Yemen, was acquitted, "Lack of evidence". Originally presented as the designer of the team that turned into a global scandal, this senior officer has been on trial with ten other people since January.
Regarding Saoud Al-Qahtani, the media advisor to the Saudi dolphin, the prosecution formalized what had long ago leaked, that it was the subject of an investigation, but was not prosecuted. Charged with the royal court of the cyber-harassment of the opponents, suspected of having been one of the inspirers of the killers, the man has disappeared from the public scene since the facts.
At the time, Jamal Khashoggi, a famous signature of the Saudi press, who went into exile in 2017 in the United States, chronicled in the pages of the Washington Post the authoritarian drift of Mohammed Ben Salman, known as "MBS", the bis king of Saudi Arabia. He was killed by lethal injection on October 2, 2018, in the Saudi consulate on the banks of the Bosphorus, where he had gone to complete administrative formalities. His body, which was dismembered, has never been found.
Award against the performers
The only people against whom a sentence has been pronounced at the end of the trial are the operatives, present on Turkish soil.
Five of them, found guilty of having "Directly participated in the murder of the victim" were sentenced to death without their identity being revealed. Maher Al-Mutreb, an intelligence officer believed to be the commando chief, and Salah Al-Tubaigy, a forensic scientist who cut the journalist's body, are likely to be among them. to bone. Three other defendants received prison terms, totaling twenty-four years, "For their role in concealing the crime".
Unsurprisingly, these verdicts confirm the thesis of the Saudi government, which has always presented the assassination of Istanbul as an operation having gone bad, carried out by agents who acted on their own initiative.
