‘CANADIAN INTEL HAS HEARD KHASHOGGI MURDER TAPES’

PARIS: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday became the first Western leader to acknowledge his country had heard recordings of the killing of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi.

“Canada has been fully briefed up on what Turkey had to share,” Trudeau said from Paris, where he was attending the Peace Forum following the WW 1 Armistice centenary.

His comments come just days after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he had given recordings “to Saudi Arabia, to America, to the Germans, the French, to the British, to all of them.”

The Canadian leader is the first since that announcement to officially confirm that “yes” his country’s intelligence had listened to the audio. He said Canada’s intelligence agencies had been working “very closely” with Turkish intelligence on Khashoggi’s killing.

‘ERDOGAN IS PLAYING A POLITICAL GAME’

Turkey on Monday lashed out at “unacceptable” and “impertinent” comments by the French foreign minister who accused President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of playing a “political game” over the murder of Khashoggi. Asked if the Turkish president was lying, Jean-yves Le Drian told France 2 television: “It means that he has a political game to play in these circumstances.”

His comments provoked fury in Ankara. “We find it unacceptable that he accused President Erdogan of ‘playing political games’,” the communications director at the Turkish presidency, Fahrettin Altun, told AFP in a statement.