Saudi rejects Turkey’s call to extradite killers of Khashoggi
MANAMA: Riyadh on Saturday dismissed Ankara’s calls to extradite 18 Saudis being held over the murder of critic Jamal Khashoggi, as Washington warned the crisis risked destabilising the Middle East.
“The individuals are Saudi nationals. They’re detained in Saudi Arabia, and the investigation is in Saudi Arabia, and they will be prosecuted in Saudi Arabia,” Foreign Minister Adel al-jubeir told a regional defence forum in Bahrain.
He was responding to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who on Friday renewed his call for the 18 men to be extradited for trial in Turkey.
Saudi journalist Khashoggi, 59, who had lived in self-imposed exile in the US since 2017, was murdered after entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on October 2 to obtain paperwork to marry his Turkish fiancee. Gruesome reports have alleged that he was killed and dismembered by a team sent from Saudi Arabia to silence the Washington Post columnist, who had criticised the kingdom’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Prince Mohammed, heir to the oil-rich nation’s throne, publicly denounced the murder as “repulsive”, while the Saudi prosecutor acknowledged for the first time this week that based on the evidence of a Turkish investigation the killing had been “premeditated”.
But US defence secretary Jim Mattis, who was also addressing the Manama forum, warned that “the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in a diplomatic facility must concern us all greatly”.
“Failure of any nation to adhere to international norms and the rule of law undermines regional stability at a time when it is needed most,” he stressed.