The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Turkey to search Saudi Consulate for journalist
ISTANBUL — Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that it will search the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul as part of an investigation into the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last week.
A statement from Turkish spokesman Hami Aksoy said Saudi authorities were “open to cooperation” and would allow an examination of the consulate grounds. It was not clear when the search would take place.
Khashoggi, a Saudi writer and critic of the kingdom’s leadership, was last seen entering the consulate in Istanbul’s Levent district on Oct. 2, when he arrived to retrieve an administrative document. The Washington Post published Monday an image from a closed circuit television camera that a person close to the investigation said showed Khashoggi’s last known seconds, as he stepped inside the consulate door.
Turkish investigators believe that Khashoggi, 59, was killed shortly after he entered and his body was later removed from the premises, a U.S. official and sources close to the investigation said.
A spokeswoman for the United Nations Human Rights Office in Geneva, Ravina Shamdasani, said Khashoggi’s disappearance was of “serious concern,” and if his death was confirmed it would be “truly shocking,” the Associated Press reported.
Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, also told reporters in Lisbon that Europe expects “a full-out investigation and full transparency from Saudi authorities on what happened,” the Reuters news agency reported.
Saudi officials have called the accusations “baseless” and “outrageous.”
“We have seen over the last few days various malicious leaks and grim rumors flying around about Jamal’s whereabouts and fate,” the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Khalid bin Salman, said in a message to journalists late Monday.
“The reports that suggest that Jamal Khashoggi went missing in the Consulate in Istanbul or that the Kingdom’s authorities have detained him or killed him are absolutely false, and baseless,” the message said.
“The first reports out of Turkey were that he exited the Consulate and then disappeared,” the statement added. “The accusations changed to the outrageous claim that he was murdered, in the Consulate, during business hours, and with dozens of staff and visitors in the building.”
“I don’t know who is behind these claims,” he said. “Nor do I care frankly.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded Monday that Saudi Arabia prove that Khashoggi, who contributed to The Washington Post’s Global Opinions section, left the consulate on his own, as Saudi officials have repeatedly asserted.
His comments were the most direct suggestion yet about potential Saudi culpability in Khashoggi’s disappearance.
“Do you not have cameras and everything of the sort?” Erdogan said of Saudi consular officials at a news conference in the Hungarian capital, Budapest. “They have all of them. Then why do you not prove this? You need to prove it.”
In his first remarks about the disappearance, President Donald Trump told reporters Monday afternoon that he was concerned. “I don’t like hearing about it. Hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now, nobody knows anything about it, but there’s some pretty bad stories going around. I do not like it,” Trump said.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in his own statement said that “we have seen conflicting reports on the safety and whereabouts” of Khashoggi. Repeating Trump’s expression of “concern,” Pompeo, who had just returned from a trip to Asia, called on the Saudi government “to support a thorough investigation of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance and to be transparent about the results of that investigation.”
Members of Congress, where there has long been bipartisan skepticism about Saudi Arabia, have issued statements and tweets demanding answers from Riyadh. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said in a string of tweets Monday that “if there is any truth to the allegations of wrongdoing by the Saudi government it would be devastating to the US-Saudi relationship and there will be a heavy price to be paid — economically and otherwise.”