Saudi Arabia pressed on missing journalist
Turkey wants answers after critic vanished at kingdom’s consulate
Turkish officials on Sunday demanded a “convincing explanation” from Saudi Arabia over the alleged killing of a dissident who disappeared during a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, sharply escalating tensions between two of the Middle East’s most important powers.
The dissident, Jamal Khashoggi, is a veteran Saudi journalist and commentator who had turned critical of the kingdom under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
After fleeing the kingdom last year for voluntary exile because he feared arrest, Khashoggi vanished after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Tuesday to pick up a document that would allow him to remarry in Turkey.
On Saturday, Turkish officials speaking on the condition of anonymity told the New York Times and other news organizations that investigators had concluded Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents inside the consulate.
“There is concrete information; it will not remain an unsolved case,” Yasin Aktay, an adviser to the head of Turkey’s ruling AKP party, said Sunday in an interview with the Turkish CNN network. “The consulate should make a clear explanation,” he added, drawing a contrast to a troubled and less-assertive period of Turkey’s recent past. “If they consider Turkey as it was like in the 1990s, they are mistaken.”
Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, did not mention Khashoggi or Saudi Arabia once during a televised address Sunday. But speaking to reporters afterward, Erdogan said he was awaiting a prosecutor’s probe about what had happened to Khashoggi.
“I am still keeping my good intentions,” he said. The crown prince and other Saudi officials have denied killing or abducting Khashoggi, saying they do not know where he is. And by midafternoon Sunday, no Turkish official had publicly accused Saudi Arabia of killing Khashoggi.
The discrepancy between the multiple anonymous allegations to the news media and top officials’ public reticence raised questions about whether Ankara would stand behind the leaks or whether it was seeking to avoid what could be a hugely disruptive fight with Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia released a statement early Sunday dismissing news reports about the accusations of unnamed Turkish officials that Saudi agents had killed Khashoggi. The consulate in Istanbul “strongly denounced these baseless allegations, and expressed doubt that they came from Turkish officials that are informed of the investigation,” the statement said.