Saudi government has now announced a series of new lies about the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, The New York Times reported saying that such lies “insult both Jamal’s memory and our intelligence.”
“The Saudi government on Friday issued a statement claiming that Jamal was killed when a fistfight went bad in its consulate in Istanbul. Really? This is a fistfight to which the Saudi goons reportedly brought a bone saw so that they could dismember him afterward; by some accounts, they began the dismemberment while he was still alive,” opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote for the NYT.
“It’s also grotesque for the Saudi authorities to claim that a journalist whose fingers they reportedly amputated as part of their torture somehow managed to engage in a fistfight. Jamal had no fists left.”
Kristof also slammed the cover-up of the murder afterward, US President Donald Trump’s downplaying of Jamal’s killing and Saudi efforts to set up scapegoats to take the fall.
The American commentator meanwhile lashed out at Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (M.B.S.) “who almost everybody believes must have approved this operation.”
M.B.S. is “now said to stand for “Mr. Bone Saw” — will lead an investigation into what happened. That’s like appointing O.J. Simpson to investigate the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson.”
He said the Saudi lies are “so blatant and implausible that they underscore how out of touch M.B.S. is, and also suggest M.B.S. believes that he will have the backing of the United States in this cover-up.”
Kristof said that M.B.S. “has already gotten away with kidnapping Lebanon’s prime minister and starving eight million Yemenis.”
In this context, he warned that if the Saudi crown prince also gets away with murdering Khashoggi, who was an American resident and Washington Post columnist, “then that’s a green light to him and any other autocrat who wants to make a troublesome journalist disappear. Journalists and democracy activists all over the world will have targets on their backs.”
Source: The New York Times
