Saudi agents sent to clean up crime
Turkish official claims team posed as group aiding Khashoggi inquiry
More than a week after Saudi agents killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Saudi Arabia sent an expert team to clean up evidence of the crime, under the guise of helping with the investigation, a senior Turkish official said Monday — the latest twist in a case that has caused an international uproar.
A pro-Turkish government newspaper, Sabah, published news of the Saudi cleanup team and photographs of two of its members, whom it identified as a chemist and a toxicologist, who visited the Saudi consulate where Khashoggi was killed.
The senior Turkish official confirmed the main details of the report and said the Saudi team was sent with the knowledge of top Saudi officials. The two men travelled to Turkey for the sole purpose of covering up evidence of the killing before Turkish police were allowed to search the premises, the official said in comments relayed by electronic message.
The two men were identified as Ahmad Abdulaziz al-Jonabi, a chemist, and Khaled Yahya al-Zahrani, a toxicologist, part of a team of Saudi investigators who spent several days in Turkey visiting the consulate and the consul’s residence, ostensibly to help with the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance, the newspaper reported.
Saudi Arabia has detained 18 people implicated in the killing of Khashoggi, but has not said who ordered what Turkish officials have characterized as the political assassination of a prominent critic of the Saudi government. Turkish and Western officials have said that it is unlikely that such a plan would have been carried out without the blessing of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Speaking on Monday in Geneva, the president of Saudi Arabia’s human rights commission, Bandar al-Aiban, vowed a full investigation and punishment of those responsible, but shed no new light on the case. His remarks, before the United Nations Human Rights Council, came in a review of the kingdom’s human rights record.
Turkey has demanded, to no avail, that Saudi Arabia disclose what became of Khashoggi’s body, that it name the “local collaborator” whom a Saudi official said helped dispose of the remains and that it turn over the18 suspects to face the Turkish justice system.
The Saudi cleanup team arrived in Istanbul on Oct. 11, nine days after Khashoggi’s death, and visited the consulate every day from Oct. 12 to Oct. 17, according to Sabah. Turkish investigators were not allowed into the consulate, which is considered Saudi sovereign territory, until Oct. 15.
When the group identified as a cleanup team was in Turkey, Saudi officials were still insisting that Khashoggi, 59, had left the consulate safely and that they did not know where he was. They later acknowledged that he had been killed in the consulate, at first describing his death as the accidental result of a fight and later calling it premeditated.