Turkish police have concluded that prominent Saudi journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi mission in Istanbul after going missing Tuesday, according to an unnamed government official.
“Based on their initial findings, the police believe that the journalist was killed by a team especially sent to Istanbul and who left the same day,” the official told AFP on Saturday.
It came hours after police confirmed that around 15 Saudis, including officials, arrived in Istanbul on two flights on Tuesday and were at the consulate at the same time as Khashoggi.
The Washington Post contributor had gone to the consulate on an administrative errand but “did not come back out” of the building, police had told the state-run Anadolu news agency.
On the back of the preliminary investigation, Ankara announced Saturday it had opened an official probe into his disappearance.
The state-run Saudi Press Agency, quoting an unnamed official at the Istanbul consulate, denied the reports of Khashoggi’s murder.
“The official strongly denounced these baseless allegations,” the agency wrote, adding that a team of Saudi investigators were in Turkey working with local authorities.
The former government adviser, who turns 60 on October 13, has lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since last year to avoid possible arrest.
Press freedom campaigners condemned reports of Khashoggi’s possible murder, with the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists demanding Riyadh give “a full and credible account” of what happened to him inside the consulate.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said on Twitter that if reports of Khashoggi’s death were confirmed, “this would constitute a horrific, utterly deplorable, and absolutely unacceptable assault on press freedom”.
Prince Mohammed earlier denied in an interview with Bloomberg that the journalist had been inside the consulate and said Turkish authorities could search the building, which is Saudi sovereign territory.
“We are ready to welcome the Turkish government to go and search our premises,” he said, adding that “we will allow them to enter and search and do whatever they want to do… We have nothing to hide”.
In the interview published Friday, the Saudi crown prince also said he understood that Khashoggi had entered the consulate but then “got out after a few minutes or one hour”.
Khashoggi fled the country in September 2017, months after Prince Mohammed was appointed heir to the throne, amid a campaign that saw dozens of dissidents arrested, including intellectuals and Islamic preachers.
The journalist said he had been banned from writing in the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, owned by Saudi prince Khaled bin Sultan al-Saud, over his defense of the Muslim Brotherhood which Riyadh has blacklisted as a terrorist organization.
The Washington Post chose to leave a blank space where Khashoggi’s column would have been in its Friday edition in support of the missing writer.
Source: AFP
