Missing Saudi reporter: Turkey pressures Riyadh

TURKEY yesterday sought to search Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul after a prominent journalist from the kingdom went missing last week, media reports said, amid claims he was murdered.

Ankara asked to search the consulate where Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi vanished last Tuesday after entering the building, Turkish broadcaster NTV reported.

A Turkish government source at the weekend said the 59-year-old had been killed. Riyadh vehemently denied the claim and said Khashoggi had left the consulate.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan yesterday asked Saudi officials to prove their claim. “Consulate officials cannot save themselves by saying that he left the building,” Erdogan told a news conference. “If he left, you have to prove it with footage.”

Ankara’s search request was made after the foreign ministry summoned the Saudi ambassador for a second time Sunday over the journalist’s disappearance.

A Turkish diplomatic source confirmed yesterday that the Saudi envoy had met Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal.

“The ambassador was told that we expected full cooperation during the investigation,” the source said. The ambassador was first summoned to the ministry on Wednesday.

Protesters gathered outside the Saudi consulate yesterday with banners reading “We will not leave without Jamal Khashoggi,” demanding to know what had happened to the reporter.

Yemeni activist and 2011 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Tawakkol Karman, said it would be an “awful crime” if the claims of his death were true. “Killing him is like killing us. This policy is just a terror policy. There’s no difference between the state terror and other terror actions,” she added.

Khashoggi went to the consulate to obtain official documents ahead of his marriage to his Turkish fiancee. Turkish police quickly said he never left the building as there was no security footage on his departure.

The consulate rejected the claims that the journalist was killed there as “baseless.”

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had previously said that Riyadh was “ready to welcome the Turkish government to go and search our premises.”

“We will allow them to enter and search and do whatever they want to do. If they ask for that, of course, we will allow them. We have nothing to hide,” Prince Salman said in an interview published on Friday.

Khashoggi had been critical of some of the crown prince’s policies and Riyadh’s intervention in the war in Yemen in Arab and Western media.