New court filings on Saudi ‘Tiger Squad’ allege global hunt for targets

The dissident spymaster who fled the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and has been hiding out in Canada has filed new court documents in a suit against Mohammed bin Salman, alleging a pressure campaign by the Saudi Crown prince included attempts to coerce his daughter to visit the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — the location where, days later, Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered.

Saad Aljabri, formerly a top adviser to Mohammed bin Nayef, the nephew of King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, fled to Canada in September 2017 following a palace coup that saw bin Nayef replaced by Mohammed bin Salman as the heir to the Saudi throne.

Aljabri has been living quietly in Toronto ever since. Many of his family have also fled Saudi Arabia, though two of his children, Omar and Sarah, were banned from leaving the country in the summer of 2017, and vanished in March 2020.

Since fleeing, Aljabri claims he’s feared for his life. In August 2020, he filed a suit in u.s. courts against the Crown Prince and multiple other defendants, alleging a conspiracy to kill him, kidnap and torture his family, or return Aljabri to the Kingdom to be silenced.

New details filed in Washington, d.c., court on Thursday detail the pressure campaign against Aljabri’s family in an attempt, he alleges, to get him to return to the Kingdom.

“In all, approximately twenty of dr. Saad’s family, friends, and business associates have been kidnapped by defendant bin Salman’s henchmen and held incommunicado in secret locations without any charges, in blatant violation of both Saudi and international law,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit also says that following the failure in October 2018 of the “Tiger Squad” assassins — 50 operatives with “a variety of experience and expertise relevant to locating and executing a target and covering up the murder” — to enter Canada and kill Aljabri, bin Salman held a meeting in May 2020 to concoct another plan to murder him.

That plan, the lawsuit claims, would involve assassins travelling to the united States and then crossing the border into Canada by land.

“As each of these increasingly coercive steps failed, defendant bin Salman directed teams to locate, detain, and kill his targets regardless of their country of residence — even if that meant blatantly violating the sovereignty of other states,” the lawsuit says.