Unclassified CIA report says Saudi leader was behind grisly murder of Washington Post journalist
MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, approved the murder and dismembering of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, according to a declassified US intelligence report released last night, but was spared from a new round of sanctions.
The report asserts that the prince, known as MBS, directed the assassination in which Mr Khashoggi, a writer for the Washington Post and a US resident, was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, then killed and cut into pieces.
The US treasury department announced sanctions against more than a dozen Saudis implicated in the murder after the long-awaited report was released yesterday, but the Biden administration did not go so far as to directly punish the de facto ruler of the kingdom himself.
“We assess that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince... approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” the four-page report, released by the Office for the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), found.
The report said the crown prince had “absolute control” of the kingdom’s security and intelligence organisations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the his authorisation.
The killing also fit a pattern of “the crown prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad”, the report added.
Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, yesterday declared a new “Khashoggi ban”, which would see the US bar entry to foreigners who threaten dissidents, beginning with 76 Saudi individuals implicated in the journalist’s death.
“We have made absolutely clear that extraterritorial threats and assaults by Saudi Arabia against activists, dissidents and journalists must end,” Mr Blinken said in a statement.
“They will not be tolerated by the United States,” he added.
Mr Khashoggi, who had written pieces critical of the Saudi regime in his weekly column and was living in self-exile, was suffocated by a 15-man team of Saudis who had travelled to Istanbul in the days before the killing. The 59-yearold’s body has never been discovered. “The crown prince viewed Khashoggi as a threat to the kingdom and broadly supported using violent measures if necessary to silence him,” the US report stated.
“Although Saudi officials had pre-planned an unspecified operation against Khashoggi we do not know how far in advance Saudi officials decided to harm him,” the ODNI added, claiming that it was not aware of the plot ahead of time.
Just one month after the murder of Mr Khashoggi, the CIA concluded with high confidence that Prince Mohammed had ordered the killing, but the declassification of their report was blocked by Donald Trump, who was president at the time. The 35-yearold prince has accepted Saudi Arabia’s responsibility in the killing, but has always denied a personal link.(© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021)