National Post (National Edition)
New court filings on Saudi `Tiger Squad' allege hunt for targets
Khashoggi-type killing mulled, documents say
The dissident spymaster who fled the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and has been hiding out in Canada has filed new court documents in a suit against Mohammed bin Salman, alleging a pressure campaign by the Saudi Crown prince included attempts to coerce his daughter to visit the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — the location where, days later, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered.
Saad Aljabri, formerly a top adviser to Mohammed bin Nayef, the nephew of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, fled to Canada in September 2017 following a palace coup that saw bin Nayef replaced by Mohammed bin Salman as the heir to the Saudi throne.
Aljabri has been living quietly in Toronto ever since. Many of his family have also fled Saudi Arabia, though two of his children, Omar and Sarah, were banned from leaving the country in the summer of 2017, and vanished in March 2020. They have not been heard from since.
Since fleeing, Aljabri claims he's feared for his life. In August 2020, he filed a suit in U.S. courts against the Crown Prince and multiple other defendants, alleging a conspiracy to kill him, kidnap and torture his family, or return Aljabri to the Kingdom to be silenced.
Saudi Arabia has maintained Aljabri in fact embezzled $4.5 billion from a state counterterrorism fund. In late January 2021 a lawsuit was filed in Ontario Superior Court against Aljabri, members of his family and other associates for fraud and misappropriation of funds. Saad Aljabri and his family have long denied this, though defence documents have yet to be filed in court.
None of the allegations have been proven in court. But, in court filings from December 2020, the Crown Prince sought to have the U.S. lawsuit dismissed, arguing Aljabri is an international fugitive and that an American court has no jurisdiction to adjudicate Saudi national interests. “Those interests include Saudi Arabia's criminal investigation and prosecution of a former high-level Saudi official and his co-conspirators for corruption, and Saudi Arabia's efforts to locate that former official — now an international fugitive — and bring him to justice,” the filing argues. The new details filed in Washington, D.C., court on Thursday, include the suggestion that a Khashoggistyle killing could have been attempted against Aljabri's daughter, Hissah Almuzaini. The documents say operatives attempted to get to her to enter the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
“Fortunately for Hissah, she never went to the consulate. After Jamal Khashoggi entered the very same consulate days later, Hissah learned the fate awaiting her if she had obeyed,” the lawsuit says.
Documents also detail the pressure campaign against Aljabri's family in an attempt, he alleges, to get him to return to the Kingdom.
Hissah's husband, Salem Almuzaini, was kidnapped in Dubai in September 2017, the lawsuit says, and tortured. “They brutally beat his feet with a metal bar hundreds of times, turning his feet black and blue, splitting open his skin, and creating a river of blood flowing down his legs,” the lawsuit claims.
Almuzaini was released in January 2018, the suit says, but again vanished in August 2020, around the time Aljabri filed his lawsuit in the U.S.
“In all, approximately twenty of Dr. Saad's family, friends, and business associates have been kidnapped by Defendant bin Salman's henchmen and held incommunicado in secret locations without any charges, in blatant violation of both Saudi and international law,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit also says that following the failure in October 2018 of the “Tiger Squad” assassins — 50 operatives with “a variety of experience and expertise relevant to locating and executing a target and covering up the murder” — to enter Canada and kill Aljabri, bin Salman held a meeting in May 2020 to concoct another plan to murder him.
That plan, the lawsuit claims, would involve assassins travelling to the United States and then crossing the border into Canada by land, instead of flying into the Macdonald–Cartier International Airport in Ottawa, as they'd attempted in October 2018.
“Undoubtedly, Defendant bin Salman changed his tactics in response to the Tiger Squad's failed attempts to enter Canada in October 2018,” the lawsuit says. “As a result of Defendant bin Salman's directive, the newest stage of a multi-year campaign of execution, Dr. Saad's life remains in dire peril to this day.”
The documents also allege bin Salman's Tiger Squad has been used to kidnap Saudis in Europe, including Prince Saud bin Saif Alnasr from France in 2015, and Prince Sultan bin Turki II, also from France, in 2016, as well as the abduction and torture of Sulaiman Aldoweesh, a dissident religious cleric, in Mecca.
“If the allegations … seem fantastical, that is only because it is difficult to fathom the depths of depravity of Defendant bin Salman and the men he empowered to carry out his will,” says the lawsuit.
These operations, the lawsuit claims, have been carried out in France (in the cases of bin Saif and bin Turki), Germany (Prince Khaled bin Farhan al Saud), Norway, where Iyad Elbaghdadi, a critic of Saudi Arabia resides under government protection, Turkey, as well as Canada.
“As each of these increasingly coercive steps failed, Defendant bin Salman directed teams to locate, detain, and kill his targets regardless of their country of residence — even if that meant blatantly violating the sovereignty of other states,” the lawsuit says.