Saudis say 5 agents face death penalty
BEIRUT — Saudi Arabia threatened five of its agents with the death penalty on Thursday for killing dissident Jamal Khashoggi, as the kingdom changed its story, again, about how the crime was committed and continued to try to distance its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, from any responsibility.
Announcing an update on the kingdom’s own investigation, the public prosecutor portrayed the killing of Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul as an improvised decision taken at the last minute by a team that had been dispatched there with orders to retrieve him.
While the prosecutor’s report did not name any of the suspects, the leader of the team that confronted Khashoggi at the consulate was Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, a frequent companion of Crown Prince Mohammed, who often traveled with him abroad, according to a Saudi official familiar with the investigation.
Thursday’s explanation closely echoed a previous Saudi account — portraying the killing as a rendition gone wrong — that President Donald Trump had derided as “one of the worst in the history of cover-ups.”
But the Saudis acknowledged for the first time on Thursday that the team sent to meet Khashoggi in Istanbul had not only ambushed and killed him in their consulate but had also dismembered his body — as Turkish officials have maintained for weeks.
Speaking to reporters in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, a spokesman for the public prosecutor said the order to kill Khashoggi had been taken by only a single intelligence agent on the scene in Istanbul, without authorization from superiors in Riyadh, and that it was accomplished with a deadly dose of a tranquilizer — not by strangulation, as the kingdom had previously said.
The mutilation of the body, the prosecutor said, was a spur-ofthe-moment decision to get the body out of the consulate.
In addition to the five threatened with execution by beheading, six others have been charged with crimes related to the killing. The prosecutor’s office said none of the accused could be identified while the investigation goes on.
The announcement Thursday filled in none of the many remaining gaps in the accounting of the killing and offered almost nothing to shake the conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies and many Western officials that the crown prince had to have authorized the assassination.
These gaps, and the Saudis’ insistence that the killing was an improvisation, present a dilemma for the Trump administration, which has embraced the crown prince as the central figure in its plans for the region and has stood by him in the face of mounting outrage over Khashoggi’s killing.
Khashoggi, a Virginia resident and Washington Post columnist, disappeared inside the consulate on Oct. 2, and Saudi Arabia maintained afterward that he had left unharmed. When the kingdom later acknowledged that he had died inside, it first claimed he had been strangled by accident in a fight with its agents — an account that convinced almost no one.
The kingdom finally acknowledged three weeks ago that evidence provided by Turkey had indicated a planned assassination, and the Trump administration welcomed the admission as a sign of progress toward accountability. “The Saudis have acknowledged that this was a premeditated attack,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News on Nov. 4.
Now, the kingdom is hedging on that acknowledgment of premeditation, with the prosecutor indicating the killing of Khashoggi was planned, at most, within a few hours before it took place.
Turkey has applied pressure on the kingdom to reveal who ordered the killing and has implied the plan must have been approved by Crown Prince Mohammed. This week, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey expressed frustration that the prince was failing to follow through on his promise to expose the truth about the disappearance and death of Khashoggi.
On Thursday, Turkey quickly dismissed the Saudis’ new explanation, with the country’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, declaring it “unsatisfying.”
“The dismembering of the body is not an instant decision,” Cavusoglu said, according to news reports. “They brought the necessary people and tools to kill him and dismember the body in advance.”
The public prosecutor said that al-Qahtani, a powerful aide to the crown prince who has directed vast social media campaigns against the kingdom’s enemies, met with some of the agents before they flew to Turkey. The purpose, the prosecutor added, was to give them “some useful information” related to “his belief that the victim had been co-opted by organizations and countries hostile to the kingdom and that his presence abroad constituted a danger to the security of the homeland.”
The agents bound Khashoggi and gave him a large dose of a tranquilizer, which killed him, the prosecutors said.