HOW COME THE CAMPAIGNING DUCHESS DIDN’T KNOW SAUDI RULER WAS MURDER SUSPECT?

FEARLESS dissident Jamal Khashoggi was last seen alive entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on the afternoon of October 2, 2018. Within two hours he was killed by a Saudi hit squad, who dismembered his body using a bone saw.

Mr Khashoggi was an outspoken critic of the Saudi regime and suspicion quickly grew that the kingdom’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, was involved.

On October 18, The Times reported how a close circle of officials and security officers around

MBS were the focus of the murder probe. A day later, The Sun told how one of MBS’s bodyguards was suspected of the brutal killing.

Later that day Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, told the BBC’s World at One radio programme that ‘all the evidence points to [the killing] being ordered and carried out by people close to Mohammed bin Salman’. Sir John’s damning comments were reported widely.

The Duchess of Sussex wore the earrings given to her as a wedding gift by MBS to a state dinner in Fiji on October 23. Ten days later, on November 2, the BBC’s respected security correspondent Frank Gardner wrote an article on the BBC News website entitled: ‘Khashoggi murder: Is Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed finished?’

He wrote: ‘Official Saudi denials that he himself had anything to do with the murder – in a plot hatched from right within his inner circle… have been met with profound scepticism.’

On November 14, the Duchess wore the earrings again at Prince Charles’s 70th birthday party at Buckingham Palace.