Anxious to seal its reconciliation with Saudi Arabia as quickly as possible, Turkey has decided to draw a line under the case of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered in 2018 in Istanbul, by ending the trial in absentia of twenty-six nationals of the kingdom tried since 2020.
Complying with the request of the Saudi prosecutor, the Turkish prosecution demanded, Thursday, March 31, the cessation of the procedure and the transfer of the file to the authorities of Riyadh. Several reasons have been put forward, including the fact that the defendants, absent from the box, “are foreign nationals” and that the international arrest warrants, formerly issued by Interpol at the request of Ankara, have remained dead letters. The court will seek the opinion of the Ministry of Justice. The trial was adjourned to April 7.
Ardent critic of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Ben Salman, especially in the columns of the washington post, Jamal Khashoggi was last seen entering the premises of the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, in order to carry out an administrative procedure. He never came out and his body was never found.
The Turkish authorities had then revealed – recordings in support, because the consulate was wiretapped – that he had been murdered there in appalling conditions, his body having been dismembered on the spot with a saw by a team of “cleaners” on mission especially by the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia had given conflicting accounts, saying the journalist, a Saudi national living in the United States and determined to move to Turkey, had left the consulate building unscathed. The kingdom had then recognized that he was dead, following a “brawl” occurred inside the consulate.
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At the end of a trial organized behind closed doors by the Saudi courts, five defendants, whose names have not been revealed, were sentenced to capital punishment, a sentence canceled in September 2020 and transformed into prison terms . The kingdom having rejected Turkish requests for the extradition of the “cleaners” and their accomplices, Ankara had decided to try twenty-six defendants in absentia.
At the time, the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, made this “political assassination” his workhorse, promising to reveal “the naked truth”. Turkey, he said then, “embodies the international conscience”. The order to kill the journalist has come “from the highest levels of the Saudi government”he had repeatedly accused.
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