The decision was expected. The five agents of the Saudi security services, considered to be the executors of the operation to silence Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist highly critical of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, will escape the death penalty. The sentence, which was pronounced in December 2019, at the end of the Riyadh trial which had whitened the supposed brains of this assassination, was commuted Monday, September 7 to twenty years in prison by a Saudi court.
This verdict, the final step in the legal proceedings launched by the kingdom in response to the global scandal caused by the journalist’s death in October 2018 in Istanbul, is the logical consequence of the forgiveness that the sons of Jamal Khashoggi had granted, in May, to the assassins. of their father. At the time, the government press presented the gesture, announced during the holy month of Ramadan, as a good deed, in accordance with Islamic tradition. But observers had doubted its spontaneous character, highlighting the multi-million dollar villas offered by the Saudi crown to the children of the deceased.
The existence of these “gifts” had been revealed by the Washington Post, the American daily where Jamal Khashoggi, famous signature of the Saudi press, gone into exile in the United States in 2017, chronicled the autocratic drift of Mohammed Ben Salman, known as “MBS”.
It was in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul, where he had gone for administrative formalities, with a view to remarriage, that the journalist was killed, by means of a lethal injection administered by a commando of barbouzes, came on the sly from Riyadh. His body, which was dismembered, has never been found.
“One more act in a parody of justice”
According to Western intelligence agencies, including the American CIA, this macabre outfit could not be carried out without the approval of the ubiquitous “MBS”, who has the upper hand over the Saudi security apparatus. But the son of King Salman, who denied having knowledge of the operation, was exonerated of all responsibility by the justice of his country, which unsurprisingly endorsed the thesis of power: that of an operation having gone wrong, driven by uncontrolled elements.
The two members of the crown prince’s entourage suspected of having designed and supervised the operation have also been exonerated by the Saudi judicial system. “MBS” media advisor, the much feared Saoud Al-Qahtani, at the forefront of opposition surveillance, was not prosecuted, and intelligence number two, General Ahmed Al-Assiri, was acquitted in December 2019.
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