First his fingers were cut off, then his head
It is becoming increasingly clear that dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was put to death in horrifying circumstances by a hit squad ordered into Turkey by the Arab state’s sinister Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
HIS killers were waiting when Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago. The Saudi journalist – a distinguished columnist for the Washington Post – was there to collect a document relating to his forthcoming wedding, while his Turkish fiancée waited in the car outside thinking he would be gone for only a few minutes.
CCTV released later showed a smartly dressed Khashoggi entering the consulate under its retractable sun canopy, nodding at the security guard as he went inside – never to re-emerge alive.
While his fiancée Hatice Cengiz assumed he was tangling with bureaucracy, Khashoggi, a leading critic of the Saudi regime, was in fact being killed in the worst way imaginable. After he failed to reappear, Cengiz said she felt responsible for him. “I have this strange feeling like I have failed to look after something so dear,” she said later.
In fact, for seven long minutes, shortly after 1pm, her fiancé was tortured and hacked to pieces with a bone-saw while still alive. He was then beheaded by members of a 15-man hit squad who had flown in from Riyadh on private jets to murder him, before his dismembered body was carted off in plastic bags to be dissolved in acid. Within two hours the killers – believed to include Saudi Arabian intelligence officers and royal House of Saud bodyguards – were gone and a cleaning team was brought in to scrub and repaint the bloodstained crime scene.
The alleged details of Khashoggi’s barbarous death have emerged from descriptions of a highly disturbing audio recording given to the Turkish media on Wednesday by a senior government official. And on the same day the names and photographs of his murderers were published in a Turkish newspaper.
Jamal Khashoggi, 59, had first attended the Saudi consulate in Istanbul four days before he was killed and was told to come back for the wedding documents. This appears to have been a ruse to allow the Saudi authorities sufficient time to arrange his brutal execution. When he returned to the consulate he was shown into the office of the Saudi consul, Mohammad al-Otaibi. There he was seized almost immediately by the agents who began to beat and torture him.
This was too much for the consul who could reportedly be heard on the tape saying: “Do this outside. You will put me in trouble.” This provoked a dark response from one of the agents: “If you want to live when you come back to Arabia, shut up.”
At some point Khashoggi is believed to have been dragged from the consul-general’s office to the table of a study next door. There, he was tortured and his fingers were cut off one by one. His “horrendous” screams of pain were so loud they were heard on a lower storey by a witness. The source said the recording later reveals the journalist was “drugged” and “killed” before a Saudi forensics expert advised his colleagues to listen to music on their headphones as they dismembered the body. This would help defuse the tension created by such a macabre task.
The chief executioner is alleged to have been Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, “Head of forensic evidence” for the Saudi general security department. While his sobriquet is “Dr Death”, Al-Tubaigy’s official title is President of the Saudi Fellowship of Forensic Pathology.
According to local media reports, Al-Otaibi is now said to have been relieved of his post at the consulate.
There is little in the above description of depravity that would suggest that Khashoggi was killed “accidentally” as Saudi sources have alleged.
“They came to kill him, not interrogate him,” insists the consulate witness who heard his screams.
It is considered highly unlikely that the execution squad would have acted in the way they did had they not been sanctioned by Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old crown prince.
He is the architect of Saudi-led war crimes in Yemen, which have cost more than 16,000 civilian lives, and it emerged this week that he once sent a bullet in an envelope to “persuade” a land registry official to help him seize land.
In November he ordered the detention of at least 11 fellow princes and hundreds of businessmen and government officials over claims of corruption.
A number of them are said to have been tortured in order to force them to pay multibilliondollar ransoms for their release. One report says that he raised no less than £194billion by raiding their bank accounts and confiscating assets. The Crown Prince objected to Khashoggi on different grounds. In his eyes the journalist was a former Saudi royal court insider who had committed the cardinal sin of turning against the regime and repeatedly speaking out against it. This qualified him for the worst form of retribution.
‘If you want to live when you get back to Arabia, shut up’
ON WEDNESDAY, Khashoggi’s final column was published posthumously by the Washington Post. In it, a man who had resigned himself to self-imposed exile from his homeland, bemoaned the lack of freedom of expression in Arab states. “Arab governments have been given free rein to continue silencing the media at an increasing rate… they have also arrested local reporters,” he wrote. “The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain, imposed not by external actors but through domestic forces vying for power.”
He mentioned his “dear friend, the prominent Saudi writer Saleh alShehi” who “wrote one of the most famous columns ever published in the Saudi press”. Khashoggi pointed out:
“He unfortunately is now serving an unwarranted five-year prison sentence for supposed comments contrary to the Saudi establishment.”
He went on to address his concern that actions such as these “no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community. Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence.”
It was just over a year ago, in September 2017, that Khashoggi wrote his first column for the Washington Post in which he revealed that he was taking himself into self-imposed exile in the US following MBS’s rise to power. Over the following months the journalist repeatedly criticised the crown prince for the direction he was taking the country. Less than 24 hours after filing his latest insights to his American colleagues, the journalist was dead – apparently a victim of exactly the kind of oppressive state-sanctioned censorship that he had taken pains to describe. A note from Karen Attiah, the Washington Post’s global opinions editor, prefaced his column and explained it had been received from Khashoggi’s translator the day after he was reported missing in Istanbul.
SHE wrote: “The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together. Now I have to accept: that is not going to happen. This column perfectly captures his commitment and passion for freedom in the Arab world. A freedom he apparently gave his life for.” In his final column, Khashoggi also reveals just why the Saudi authorities may have been so concerned about his influence. He tells of his gratitude that his publication had “taken the initiative to translate many of my pieces and publish them in Arabic”.
“Arabs need to read in their own language so they can understand,” he wrote. “The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices.”
Now – in the most appalling circumstances – one educated voice with a global reach has been permanently silenced by the very people he was seeking to enlighten.