by Owen Wilson
‘[The authorities] have a history of trying to lure people into embassies, they asked me to go inside the embassy in 2010 and I refused,’ he said after Khashoggi went missing. ‘I haven’t travelled in years for fear of entering a country where I might be picked up. I know dissidents who are now scared to leave their apartments.’
While already oppressive, it seemed that the royal regime had shifted gears under MBS. Prince Abdulaziz, the forty-five-year-old son of the late King Fahd, allegedly disappeared in 2017 amid rumours he had been put under house arrest. Khaled bin Farhan said that Abdul-Aziz’s family had no idea where he was, but they knew he was unwell. Also missing was Prince Khaled bin Talal, the fifty-six-year-old brother of Saudi billionaire al-Waleed bin Talal, who was arrested in December 2017. Royal family members said they have no idea where he was.
And in January 2018, Prince Salman bin Abdulaziz, an expert fencer and graduate of the Sorbonne, was called to the royal palace in Riyadh with some of his relatives. Soon after they arrived, a fight broke out between them and the bodyguards of the Crown Prince. The thirty-six-year-old Prince Salman was beaten unconscious. He has not been heard from since. His father, who was at the scene, was arrested two days later.
Non-royal Saudis were treated even more harshly. Ghanem al-Dosari, a London-based Saudi satirist, was attacked in a London street by two thought-to-be agents of MBS’s regime. Dosari, who has refugee status in the UK, published footage of two men hitting him in the face in the Brompton Road on his YouTube channel that mocks the Saudi regime in August 2018. According to Dosari, they said: ‘F*** London – the Queen is our slave.’ He had received death threats in the past, including a threatening phone call, which he taped and published.
Major General Ali al-Qahtani, an aide to a senior Saudi prince seen as a potential rival to MBS, died in government custody after being detained in MBS’s Ritz-Carlton shake-down of 200 leading Saudis. The Daily Telegraph reported that the general’s ‘neck was twisted unnaturally as though it had been broken’ and that his body had burn marks which appeared to be the result of electric shocks. General Qahtani was taken to hospital, but was reportedly returned to his interrogation after being seen by doctors. The government has not offered an official explanation for how he died.
‘People are very scared,’ said a senior prince about the current situation. ‘MBS is the reason people in my country are no longer sleeping.’
Days after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, reports came through that a journalist had been tortured to death in Saudi Arabia.
The authorities said Turki Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Jasser secretly ran a Twitter account called Kashkool, which exposed human rights violations by officials and the royal family in Saudi Arabia. He was arrested after Saudi moles in Twitter’s regional office in Dubai unmasked him.
Amnesty International also reported that three female activists in prison in Saudi Arabia were subjected to electric shocks, torture, flogging and sexual harassment by officers.
One of the men accused was Saud al-Qahtani, the royal adviser to MBS and, as would be revealed later, the organiser of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi who had had a heated Skype call with him before he was killed.
For Saudi Arabia’s friendly nations – whose citizens cannot be killed at will, or at any rate not without intercession of a criminal verdict – these allegations were a thorny matter.
In August 2018, Canada’s foreign minister had tweeted her alarm at the imprisonment of the sister of a Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who was himself in prison for ‘insulting Islam through electronic channels’ and sentenced to a thousand lashes. Riyadh announced a suspension of diplomatic ties, expelled the Canadian ambassador, declared a freeze on new investment and withdrew Saudi students from Canada. There was also concern about Salman al-Ouda, a religious scholar detained after refusing to tweet in support of the Qatar blockade and who may face the death penalty.
Meanwhile all was quiet on the Saudi front. It had still not granted access to the consulate to Turkish investigators as MBS had promised despite having ‘nothing to hide’.
Quoting an official Saudi source, Saudi-funded Al-Arabiya TV however now reported that Riyadh ‘welcomes the Turkish response to the request to form a joint team into Khashoggi’s disappearance’. The source added: ‘We trust the ability of the joint team… to carry out its mission. Saudi Arabia is concerned about the safety of its citizens.’
Meanwhile MBS’s position in the kingdom remained unassailable. ‘The bottom line is that the king has made it clear that despite the Khashoggi affair, he is not planning on removing his son,’ a western diplomat told the Sunday Times. ‘There is no group of people who are going to revolt against the king.’
Also MBS continued to be popular among ordinary Saudis who backed his social reforms. The killing of Khashoggi, a member of the Saudi elite and intelligence establishment, did not have a huge impact on them. The diplomat said: ‘In Saudi they say they’re sorry it happened but my wife gets to drive and I get to go to the movies.’
There would be some business consequences though. Richard Branson froze business links with Saudi Arabia following Khashoggi’s disappearance.
‘I had high hopes for the current government in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and it is why I was delighted to accept two directorships in the tourism projects around the Red Sea,’ he said. ‘I felt that I could give practical development advice and also help protect the precious environment around the coastline and islands. What has reportedly happened in Turkey around the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if proved true, would clearly change the ability of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi Government.’
‘We have asked for more information from the authorities in Saudi and to clarify their position in relation to Mr Khashoggi. While those investigations are ongoing and Mr Khashoggi’s presence is not known, I will suspend my directorships of the two tourism projects. Virgin will also suspend its discussions with the Public Investment Fund over the proposed investment in our space companies Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit.’
Branson also pulled of MBS’s Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh – known as ‘Davos in the desert’ – along with World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, Uber chief Dara Khosrowshahi, Viacom’s Robert Bakish, Steve Case, former head of AOL and Andy Rubin, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur best known for creating the Android smart phone operating system. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, and The Economist’s editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, were no longer attending, and Arianna Huffington, the entrepreneur, media mogul and Uber board member, has also pulled out of the conference, having previously served on its advisory board. The Financial Times, The New York Times, Bloomberg, CNN and CNBC had withdrawn as media sponsors. Ford and JP Morgan also pulled out, along with government officials from the UK, US and other western nations where the media was not under state control.
Meanwhile, in an interesting echo of the Salisbury visit of the Skripal hit squad of the two Russian assassins, al-Arabiya baited the international media by saying that the fifteen-man Saudi security team whose pictures appeared in the Turkish press were, in fact, ‘tourists’.
Turkish officials had no problem puncturing that balloon by providing the first details of the audio and video material and which proved that Khashoggi fell victim to this fifteen-strong elite team of assassins by whom he was grabbed as soon as he walked into consul general al-Otaibi’s office.
‘The voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,’ said one Turkish official. ‘You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic. You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured and murdered.’
He was dragged from the Consul General’s office into his study next door, where he was dumped on a table. Al-Otaibi himself could be heard saying: ‘Do this outside. You’re going to get me in trouble.’
‘If you want to live when you return to Saudi
Arabia, be quiet,’ sneered Dr al-Tubaigy.
Khashoggi was held down as he was screaming in pain while this fingers were cut off – a punishment that the Crown Prince had warned would happen to those who criticised him. Khashoggi was injected with substance to silence him and throttled. Then there was a sudden silence.
An anonymous Turkish source told Middle East Eye: ‘Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive. The killing took seven minutes.’
Further leaks to the Turkish press claimed the doctor directed the torture, using his expertise to administer drugs which would keep the Khashoggi conscious during the brutal interrogation, which saw his limbs cut off before he was decapitated.
The screaming only stopped when he was injected with an unknown substance thought to have been morphine. Dr al-Tubaigy then finished dismembering his body with a bone saw while Khashoggi was still breathing.
It was at this point that Dr al-Tubaigy told the others present, ‘When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do that too’. It drowned out the screams.
‘There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,’ another official source leaked to the Turkish press.
10 ‘Rogues’
ℭ
Thirteen days after Khashoggi disappeared, Turkish investigators were finally allowed into the Saudi consulate. Hours before a Saudi team of ‘investigators’ had done their preparatory job. They were really a cleaning crew who had set about their work with eight large bottles of floor-cleaning fluid along with other chemicals and six hundred bin liners, all delivered under the full glare of the TV cameras outside. The Turkish investigators arrived in a motorcade of six cars. The Saudi delegation entered the consulate an hour before Turkish police arrived and remained inside until the search was concluded.
The Turkish investigators were carrying no equipment after the Saudis had banned the use of Luminol, a forensic chemical that reveals bloodstains even if they have been washed clean. However, after an eight-hour search, they left with samples, including soil from the consulate garden. President Erdoğan suggested they found evidence of fresh coats of paint and ‘toxic materials’, but did not elaborate. One senior Turkish official leaked to the Washington Post there had been apparent attempts to scrub the scene and repaint areas, adding for the avoidance of doubt: ‘People who have nothing to hide don’t behave like this.’
Meanwhile the US script about Saudi Arabia continued. President Trump said that he had spoken to the ailing King Salman himself, who professed to having no knowledge about the missing journalist. Trump then speculated that ‘rogue killers’ may have been responsible for the murder. There had already be reports in the press that the Saudis were preparing to make a statement along these lines.
‘Been hearing the ridiculous “rogue killers” theory was where the Saudis would go with this. Absolutely extraordinary they were able to enlist the president as their PR agent to float it,’ retorted Chris Murphy, a Democrat senator.
The New York Times took up President Trump’s theme. Information had been leaked to the paper that the Crown Prince had indeed approved the interrogation of Mr Khashoggi, or his rendition back to Saudi Arabia. But a member of its intelligence services, who merely happened to be a friend of the Crown Prince, had been ‘tragically incompetent’. He had been trying to prove himself during the operation, which led to the journalist’s death. The shift in the Saudi position had come after the US finally threatened sanctions against the kingdom.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew out to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Salman and have dinner with the Crown Prince, ostensibly to have talks over Khashoggi’s disappearance. On the same day, $100 million would be transferred from the Saudi coffers to the US Treasury, ringing up Donald Trump’s demand on 2 October that Saudi Arabia should pay more for the US. President Trump also spoke to MBS on the phone. He tweeted: ‘Just spoke with the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who totally denied any knowledge of what took place in their Turkish Consulate.’
Trump also defended Saudi Arabia from further criticism over the case, telling Associated Press with feeling that it was a case of ‘you’re guilty until proven innocent, I don’t like that’.
It was noted though that Jared Kushner was conspicuous by his absence from the public platform. He had of course earlier been advising the Crown Prince on how to minimise the fallout from the Khashoggi disappearance by being transparent.
The rogue script that was agreed in the deal between the US and Saudi Arabia was now replacing the one where Saudi Arabia was ‘disgusted’ about the accusation of Khashoggi’s assassination in the consulate.
Inside the kingdom those who only received Saudi media and didn’t have access to foreign media were now thoroughly confused by the sudden concession by their government that Saudis close to MBS had after killed Khashoggi – and that it hadn’t been done by foreigners.
In the early hours of 16 October, Khashoggi’s younger son Abdullah tweeted a typed Arabic statement posted ‘for immediate release’, which the Washington Post picked up and published. It said: ‘We, the children of journalist Jamal Khashoggi are following with growing concern the conflicting reports on his fate after we lost contact with him two weeks ago following his entry into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
This time the family once again loyally embroidered the new Saudi script of a rogue operation, ‘The family is now trying to overcome the shock of the developments and gather all his children. Out of our moral and legal responsibility, we demand the immediate formation of an independent and neutral international committee to gather the facts into his disappearance and conflicting reports on his death.’
Just for the avoidance of any doubt, the message also reaffirmed both the honour of the Saudi government and the Khashoggi family name. ‘Ultimately, the family calls on all sides to respect our privacy, particularly at this difficult time, and refrain from politicising his case and undermining his good reputation, which all people attest to.’
Two weeks after Khashoggi had disappeared from its consulate, Riyadh had finally changed its tune.
Rather than continue to maintain that Khashoggi had left the consulate in one piece, the way was now open for the Saudi government to follow King Salman and Trump’s lead and blame ‘rogue killers’. The official line now was that Khashoggi had been killed in the consulate after a fight broke out between him and the fifteen-man interrogation team, who had intended to take him back to Saudi Arabia. He died after being put in a chokehold, the Saudi government said. The team were then engaged in a cover up and employed a ‘local collaborator’ to dispose of Khashoggi’s body. MBS knew nothing of this, in the new official Saudi script, though the person to be blamed was ‘a Saudi intelligence official who was a friend of the Crown Prince,’ The New York Times reported.
The New York Times then pointed out a glaring problem with the latest official story.
On 10 October it had reported information leaked to it by Turkish officials that Khashoggi was ‘dismembered with a bone saw brought for that purpose’. Dr Salah al-Tubaigy, the specialist in gathering DNA from crime scenes and dissecting bodies, was with the interrogation team, along with his bone saw, it had reported further to the Turkish leaks. Clearly he was there for a purpose. He stayed late in Istanbul until 8:29pm that day, long enough to supervise the initial forensic clean-up of the consulate.
However, it might be convenient for both the US and Turkey to swallow this story, the newspaper added. Neither country was looking for a diplomatic confrontation and both countries had strong incentives to agree to a version of events that absolved Crown Prince Mohammed. One could see why MBS, Erdoğan, Putin and Trump disliked a free press.
On 17 October, Mohammed al-Otaibi, Saudi’s consul general in Istanbul, was unceremoniously sacked and was placed under investigation over the disappearance of Khashoggi. At least that is what Saudi Arabia claimed. He flew back to Riyadh after the UN urged Saudi to lift diplomatic immunity in t
he investigation.
But where were Khashoggi’s body parts? The story circulated that his body had been dissolved in acid after he had been murdered. A source close to the investigation told Sky News that a ‘very fast-acting chemical’ had been used. Meanwhile Turkish investigators were finally also allowed access to consul general al-Otaibi’s residence. Floodlights and a drone were deployed in a search of the garden, because Turkish authorities were not permitted to go into the consulate’s garden or to inspect the well in the garden.
Jamal Khashoggi then found a voice from beyond the grave. His last column, ostensibly submitted on the day he went missing, was finally published in the Washington Post on 18 October.
In a note with the column, Karen Attiah, the Post’s global opinions editor, said the piece perfectly captured Khashoggi’s commitment to freedom in the Arab world: ‘A freedom he apparently gave his life for.’ The Washington Post had held off publishing it in the hope that Khashoggi was alive and would return, but with officials talking of rogue Saudi operators and bone saws the intelligence services on all sides had confirmed Khashoggi’s demise.
‘Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen,’ she wrote. ‘This is the last piece of his I will edit for the Post.’
In the article, headed ‘What the Arab world needs most is free expression’, Khashoggi described how the optimism of the Arab Spring in 2011 was quickly dashed and replaced by the Middle East’s version of an Iron Curtain, imposed by domestic forces as they grappled for power. The rest of the world had done little as journalists were arrested and newspapers silenced, he said.