Journo’s disappearance puts Saudi prince under cloud
ISTANBUL: It was only six months ago that Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince was feted in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, Manhattan and Washington as a reformist monarchinwaiting, already putting a modernist stamp on an intensely traditional — and fabulously wealthy — desert kingdom.
Now the image of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (33) is tarnished by growing suspicion of Saudi state involvement in what may have been a brutal assassination of a critic.
And the deepening mystery leaves the Trump administration, which has embraced the House of Saud more warmly than has any other Western leader, in an increasingly awkward spot.
The crisis was sparked by the disappearance and possible killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a wellknown and wellconnected Saudi journalist, selfexiled in the United States, who had for months sounded the alarm over increasingly autocratic moves by the crown prince.
On October 2, Khashoggi (59) walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain some routine paperwork and has not been seen since. A flood of media reports have cited Turkish investigators as saying they believe he was killed soon after entering the building and his corpse disposed of by an elite Saudi security team.
The kingdom has maintained its innocence.
Human rights groups, together with Khashoggi’s many friends in the Washington establishment, have expressed horror over stillunproven indications that a gruesome fate befell the former Saudi insider, who wrote opinion columns for
The Washington Post.
Many longtime observers of
Saudi Arabia, however, see the affair not as some sort of aberration, but part of a grimly logical progression of events, driven by a thinskinned young royal taking increasingly drastic measures to insulate himself against criticism.
‘‘There’s almost a sense now that if he wants to do something, no matter how illconsidered, he does it,’’ said Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Project on US Relations with the Islamic World.
With a royal family numbering in the thousands, palace intrigue is a constant in the kingdom. Mohammed was named crown prince last year.
Two years earlier, as a brash and untested defence minister, he launched what was to become a disastrous war in nextdoor Yemen. And MBS, as he is widely called, made waves again a year ago when he launched what was billed as a massive anticorruption drive, but what critics called a blatant campaign to shake down wealthy rivals and consolidate his power.
Trump, who on Tuesday expressed vague hopes that the situation would ‘‘sort itself out’’, had toughened his stance some what by yesterday.
‘‘To reporters, to anybody, we cannot let this happen,’’ he said.
‘‘And we’re going to get to the bottom of it.’’
Lawmakers displayed considerably more urgency.
Putting pressure on Trump, a bipartisan group of foreign policy leaders in the Senate sent the White House a letter yesterday that could formally set the stage for sanctions against the Saudis over Khashoggi’s disappearance.
There were growing signs that Khashoggi, whose columns criticising the crown prince had been distributed by The Washington Post in Arabic, had been marked for retribution.
The Post yesterday reported United States intelligence had previously intercepted Saudi official communications in which plans to capture him were discussed.
The disappearance chilled the Saudi dissident exile community.
‘‘The prospect of putting critics and activists abroad on Saudi blacklists while awaiting their turn for assassination by death squads is daunting!’’ tweeted Madawi alRasheed, a Saudi and a London School of Economics visiting professor.
investigators believe he was killed soon after entering the building and his corpse disposed of by an elite Saudi security team