Turkey describes audio of torture, dismemberment
ISTANBUL — His killers were waiting when Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago. They severed his fingers and later beheaded and dismembered him, according to details from audio recordings described by a senior Turkish official on Wednesday.
Khashoggi was dead within minutes, and within two hours, the killers were gone, the recordings suggested.
The leaking of such details, on the same day Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was visiting Turkey, reflected an escalation of pressure by the Turkish government on Saudi Arabia and the United States for answers on the fate of Khashoggi, a prominent dissident journalist who wrote for The Washington Post.
Top Saudi officials have repeatedly denied any involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance — denials that they repeated to Pompeo when he visited Saudi Arabia on Tuesday.
A team of 15 Saudi agents, some with ties to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was waiting for Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate the moment he arrived, at about 1:15 p.m. on Oct. 2. After he was shown into the office of the Saudi consul, Mohammad al-Otaibi, the agents seized Khashoggi almost immediately and began to beat and torture him, eventually cutting off his fingers, the senior Turkish official said.
“Do this outside. You will put me in trouble,” al-Otaibi told them, according to the Turkish official and a report in the Turkish newspaper Yeni Safak, both citing audio recordings said to have been obtained by Turkish intelligence.
“If you want to live when you come back to Arabia, shut up,” one of the agents replied to al-Otaibi, according to both the official and the newspaper.
As they cut off Khashoggi’s head and dismembered his body, a doctor of forensics who had been brought along for the dissection and disposal had advice for the others, according to the senior Turkish official. Listen to music, he told them, as he put on headphones. That, the doctor said, was what he does to ease the tension when doing such work, according to the Turkish official, describing the contents of the audio recording. Such information would not have been disclosed in Turkey without the consent of the government.
The Turkish leaks implicating Saudi officials in the Khashoggi case have followed a distinctive pattern. The leaks stopped as diplomatic steps to address the matter escalated. But the leaks appeared to resume Wednesday after Saudi leaders repeated their denials of involvement to Pompeo, and after President Donald Trump defended the crown prince as having been unfairly accused.
Trump said on Wednesday that the United States has asked for copies of any audio or video evidence that Turkish authorities may possess — “if it exists.”
Meanwhile, The Washington Post published a new column by Khashoggi in which he discusses the importance of a free press in the Middle East.
Khashoggi, who had written previous columns for The Post, filed this one just before he disappeared. It was published online Wednesday night in the U.S.