Turkey: Saudis sent experts to remove slaying evidence

ISTANBUL — More than a week after Saudi agents killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, Saudi Arabia sent an expert team to clean up evidence of the crime, under the guise of helping with the investigation, a senior Turkish official said Monday — the latest twist in a case that has caused an international uproar.

A pro-government newspa- per, Sabah, published news of the Saudi cleanup team and photographs of two of its members, whom it identified as a chemist and a toxicolo- gist, who visited the Saudi Consulate where Khashoggi was killed.

The senior Turkish official confirmed the main details of the report and said the Saudi team was sent with the knowledge of top Saudi officials. The two men trav- eled to Turkey for the sole purpose of covering up evidence of the killing before Turkish police were allowed to search the premises, the official said in comments relayed by electronic message.

The two men were iden- tified as Ahmad Abdulaziz al-Jonabi, a chemist, and Khaled Yahya al-Zahrani, a toxicologist, part of a team of Saudi investigators who spent several days in Turkey visiting the consulate and the consul’s residence, ostensibly to help with the investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance, the news- paper reported.

The Turkish official con- firmed the names of the two individuals and said that they were part of a cleanup team. The official spoke on condi- tion of anonymity, according to the rules of his office.

Saudi Arabia has detained 18 people implicated in the killing of Khashoggi, but has not said who ordered what Turkish officials have characterized as the politi- cal assassination of a prom- inent critic of the Saudi government. Turkish and West- ern officials have said that it is unlikely that such a plan would have been carried out without the blessing of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is seen as the country’s de facto ruler and has been consolidating his grip on power since last year.

Speaking on Monday in Geneva, the president of Saudi Arabia’s human rights commission, Bandar al-Ai- ban, vowed a full investigation and punishment of those responsible, but shed no new light on the case. His remarks, before the United Nations Human Rights Council, came in a review of the kingdom’s human rights record.

Turkey has demanded, to no avail, that Saudi Arabia disclose what became of Khashoggi’s body, that it name the “local collabo- rator” who a Saudi official has said helped dispose of the remains and that it turn over the 18 suspects to face the Turkish justice system.

The Saudi cleanup team arrived in Istanbul on Oct. 11, nine days after Khashoggi’s death, and visited the consulate every day from Oct. 12 to Oct. 17, according to Sabah. Turkish investigators were not allowed into the consulate, which is considered Saudi sovereign territory, until Oct. 15. Sabah published photographs of al-Jonabi and al-Zahrani emerging from the entrance of the consulate and also published photographs that the newspaper’s investigative editor, Abdurrahman Simsek, said were head shots from cameras at airport passport control.

The men arrived on the same day as a Saudi delegation that met with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Oct. 11, as Turkish officials demanded to know what had happened to Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government who lived in the United States and wrote opinion articles for The Washington Post. He had entered the consulate Oct. 2 for a prearranged meeting to collect papers that would allow him to marry his Turkish fiancée and was never seen again.

When the group identified as a cleanup team was in Turkey, Saudi officials were still insisting that Khashoggi, 59, had left the consulate safely and that they did not know where he was. They later acknowledged that he had been killed in the consulate, at first describing his death as the accidental result of a fight and later calling it premeditated.

Journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of Saudis, lived in U.S.