Istanbul police report shows new shocking details about Khashoggi murder
A new report by Istanbul police says Jamal Khashoggi’s body might have been burned at the Saudi Consulate along with pieces of raw meat
A RECENT report revealed new details of the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, implying that the evidence of the killing might have been destroyed in a fire in a tandoor cooking pit in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Released by an Istanbul police department yesterday, the 2018 annual report details all the works of the department in the past year. The report states that the hit squad that killed Khashoggi ordered 32 portions of raw meat from a well-known restaurant for the consulate following the murder and cooked that meat in a tandoor pit. It is implied in the report that evidence of the murder might have been burned at the same time in an attempt to destroy DNA evidence at a high temperature.
THE report states that there are three wells in the consulate. Two of them are water wells, while the other is a floor furnace that can house a fire, burning natural gas and wood. It adds that with extremely intense fire, the temperature might be high enough to destroy DNA evidence from Khashoggi’s body. The report also reiterated that one of the members of the hit squad, Dr. Salah Muhammed Al-Tubaigy, the head of forensic evidence, who did his master’s degree on the analysis of DNA extracted from bones, was an expert on the issue.
Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by a group of Saudi operatives in the country’s consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. Initially denying and later downplaying the incident as an accidental killing in a fistfight, almost three weeks after the disappearance, Riyadh finally admitted that Khashoggi was murdered in a premeditated action but denied any involvement of the royal family.
The incident was blamed on lowerlevel officials. A Saudi public prosecutor’s spokesman said that 21 Saudis had been taken into custody over the case, 11 of whom had been indicted and referred to trials. The prosecutor has said that the authorities were seeking the death penalty for five of the 11 suspects.
Despite more than four months passing since Khashoggi’s assassination, the whereabouts of his body remain unknown.
Reiterating that the cameras at the consulate were reported broken by onsite personnel, the report said their investigation discovered that the technical service that takes care of the cameras was unaware of the issue.
“There was no reported malfunctioning of the cameras in 2018,” the report said, adding that the last report on broken cameras was done on July 5, 2017.
The report also states that the fiancee of Khashoggi could have been killed at the consulate on the same day, if events had played out differently.
The report states on the day of the incident, the consulate personnel who welcomed Khashoggi informed the hit team about the journalist’s arrival immediately; however, the same official, despite seeing Hatice Cengiz, did not tell the hit team that there was someone waiting for Khashoggi outside. The report states that if the personnel had informed the hit team about Cengiz, the murder might have been prevented or in a worst-case scenario, she might have been killed as well.
The report also revealed new footage from that day, which finally uncovered the local collaborator that was mentioned by Saudi authorities. In the footage, the body double of Khashoggi seen wearing a hoodie, was reported to be the local collaborator. His identity, however, still remains unknown.
The foreign minister of Saudi Arabia previously mentioned a local collaborator who helped the hit squad commit the murder, only to later deny that such a person even existed.
Meanwhile, it has been reported that a total of 224 denunciations are being evaluated for the Khashoggi murder. The most striking, the report said, was from the U.S., which was from a person who claimed to be linked to NASA and suggested that Khashoggi was taken to Cairo and killed there.