Execution looms for Khashoggi assassins

SAUDI Arabia’s top prosecutor has announced he’s recommended the death penalty for five suspects charged with ordering and carrying out the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.

The announcement by the kingdom’s top prosecutor, Saud al-Mojeb, was published in a statement carried by the state-run Saudi Press Agency. The brutal death of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, has shocked the world.

Turkey says an assassination squad was sent from Riyadh for the writer, and insists the orders for the killing came from the highest levels of the Saudi government.

A spokesman for al-Mojeb’s office, Shalan al-Shalan, told a press conference in Riyadh that Khashoggi’s killers had set in motion plans for the killing on September 29 three days before his slaying in Istanbul.

He said the killers drugged and killed the writer inside the consulate, before dismembering the body and handing it over for disposal to an unidentified local collaborator.

Prosecutors said the highestlevel official incriminated in connection with the killing is former deputy intelligence chief Ahmed al-Assiri, who has been fired.

Al-Assiri is facing charges that include ordering Khashoggi’s forced return to Saudi Arabia.

Saudi prosecutors said al-Assiri deemed Khashoggi a threat because of his work as a writer and because he was allegedly backed by groups and countries that are hostile to Saudi Arabia.

Khashoggi had been living in self-imposed exile abroad for nearly a year before he was killed by Saudi agents at the consulate on October 2.

Khashoggi had gone to the consulate in Istanbul to obtain documents for his upcoming marriage.