The operation to take Khashoggi from the consulate to a safe house for question turned violent, say two Saudi officials who spoke to The AP
Jamal Khashoggi was targeted inside Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Turkey and a “body double was on hand to aid in a cover-up,” The Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
Three weeks after Khashoggi went missing, Saudi Arabia has offered various explanations all with conflicting accounts of what happened to the journalist.
“Saudi officials tell the AP they did in fact send a team to Turkey that included a forensics expert and a member whose job was to dress in the 59-year-old writer’s clothes and pretend to be him,” The AP reported.
Khashoggi vanished after entering the Saudi consulate on Oct. 2 to obtain documents for his upcoming marriage.
Soon after he went missing, Turkish officials said 15 Saudis arrived in Istanbul on the day of his disappearance in two planes and visited the consulate while he was still inside.
The account of the events provided to The AP by two Saudi officials confirms that the murder was premeditated, and also reveals attempts to isolate the horrific event from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The officials said the Saudi operatives were acting on the orders of King Salman’s predecessor, King Abdullah, who sought for Saudi dissidents to be brought back to the kingdom to allegedly discuss the nation’s future.
The plan was purportedly to take Khashoggi from the consulate to a “safe house” for questioning, but “the operation with Khashoggi turned violent.”
“The team included a former Khashoggi colleague who advised him to return to the kingdom. When that failed, the writer, by their account, asked if he was going to be kidnapped. Told he was going to be taken to a safe house, they say he started to yell for help. That’s when an unidentified person on the team applied a chokehold, which the officials said was intended only to keep Khashoggi quiet but ended up killing him instead.”
Nine of the 15-member squad “panicked and made plans with a local Turkish “collaborator” to remove the body. One official said the body was rolled up in some sort of material and taken from the consulate by the collaborator.”
Khashoggi was a U.S. resident who wrote columns for the Washington Post and a critic of the Saudi government, calling for reforms.
After denying any involvement in the disappearance of Khashoggi, 59, for two weeks, Saudi Arabia on Saturday morning said he had died in a fistfight at the consulate. An hour later, another Saudi official attributed the death to a chokehold, which a senior official reiterated.
