Op-ed: Saudi government ordered killing
In an op-ed published Friday in The Washington Post, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wrote about the questions surrounding Jamal Khashoggi’s death and says the order to kill him came “from the highest levels of the Saudi government.”
The piece, posted by the U.S. newspaper that Mr. Khashoggi worked for, is the most direct accusation made by Mr. Erdogan to date against the Saudis.
Mr. Khashoggi, 59, was last seen alive around lunchtime on Oct. 2 entering Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate, where he hoped to obtain paperwork that would have allowed him to marry Hatice Cengiz, a Turkish national.
U.S., Turkey sanctions
WASHINGTON— The United States and Turkey have lifted sanctions against top officials in each other’s government in a mutual sign of warming diplomatic relations between the two NATO allies after last month’s release of an American pastor.
The Trump administration had imposed financial sanctions on two Turkish officials in August to punish the country for the two-year detention of the pastor, Andrew Brunson. In turn, Turkey placed its own sanctions on Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary.
In Ankara, Hami Aksoy, the Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman, said the sanctions against Mr. Sessions and Ms. Nielsen “responded according to reciprocity principle, which is basis of diplomatic practices.”
Also in the world ...
In Jakarta, Indonesia, new details about the crashed Lion Air jet’s previous flight cast more doubt on the Indonesian airline’s claim to have fixed technical problems, as hundreds of personnel searched the sea for a fifth day Friday for victims and the plane’s fuselage. ... In Cairo, clashes erupted in a strategic Yemeni port city and airstrikes pummeled the country’s capital on Friday, as the U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition launched a fresh offensive in the Middle East’s poorest country, two days after an American call for a cease-fire. ... In Dakar, Senegal, the Nigerian army, part of a military criticized for rampant human rights abuses, used the words of President Donald Trump to justify its fatal shootings of rock-throwing protesters.