‘Khashoggi outcry may hit US-Saudi ties’

FORMER SAUDI INTELLIGENCE CHIEF TURKI DENOUNCES ‘DEMONISATION’ OF COUNTRY

We value our strategic relationship with the US and hope to sustain it. We hope the US reciprocates in kind.”

The outcry in the US demonising Saudi Arabia over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul threatens US-Saudi strategic ties, the former chief of Saudi intelligence who had ministerial rank warned on Wednesday.

“We value our strategic relationship with the US and hope to sustain it. We hope the US reciprocates in kind,” Royal family member Prince Turki Bin Faisal said in an address to the National Council on USArab Relations, a non-profit advocacy organisation.

Prince Turki, to whom Khashoggi once served as an adviser, has also served as an ambassador to London and Washington. His speech denouncing what he called “the demonisation of Saudi Arabia” clearly carried Riyadh’s imprimatur, as he heads an Islamic research centre named after his father, the late King Faisal.

Turki’s address came after Istanbul’s chief prosecutor on Tuesday said that Khashoggi was suffocated in a premeditated killing and his body was then dismembered.

Recalling that more than 70 years of US-Saudi ties survived previous crises, Turki said, “Nowadays, this relationship is once again threatened”. “The tragic and unjustified” slaying of Khashoggi “is the theme of today’s onslaught and demonisation of Saudi Arabia in the same fashion as the previous

Prince Turki Bin Faisal | Former Saudi intelligence chief

crises. The intensity and gleefulness of it is equally unfair,” he said. “Subjecting our relationship to this issue is not healthy at all.”

The Trump administration is demanding full accountability from Riyadh in Khashoggi’s death. In what it called a first step, it revoked the visas of some Saudi officials implicated in the slaying.

The US-Saudi relationship “is too big to fail,” Turki said.

Those ties, he noted, transcend oil production, trade, arms sales and investment to cooperation on Middle East peace efforts, stabilising oil markets, fighting extremism and containing Iran, the kingdom’s main regional foe.

This came as Turkey’s justice minister renewed a call on Saudi Arabia to cooperate in the investigation into the killing, saying “no one can escape responsibility.”

Abdul Hamid Gul said yesterday that Saudi Arabia’s top prosecutor — who spent three days in Istanbul — failed to answer Turkey’s questions.