Media lenses focused on Turkey’s horror show
More than a dozen lenses are trained on the entrance to the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, the spot where journalist Jamal Khashoggi was last seen on October 2.
The four-storey building which sits behind three-metre walls ringed with barbed wire is an unlikely site for a Tarantinoesque murder, allegedly ordered by one of the world’s most powerful men, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman.
Saudi Arabia says Khashoggi was killed in a ‘‘fist fight’’, and 18 Saudis are being held as suspects.
A long row of news cameras from Turkish networks flanks the leafy square.
Directly opposite the consulate entrance, behind rows of metal barricades, veteran CNN reporter Nic Robertson delivers a piece to camera dressed from the waist up in suit and tie, his cargo pants out of shot of the camera.
Yesterday, as American, Scandinavian, Arabic and British news outlets beamed regular updates to their viewers, a logjam of late-model blackedout Mercedes-Benzes and TV satellite trucks took up every inch of the square. Bemused locals skirted around the cameras and cars to get to their local supermarket, some stopping for a selfie, while young children begged for spare coins.
Khashoggi went into the consulate two weeks ago for paperwork required to marry his Turkish fiancee but never came out.
The Washington Post columnist was Saudi born and bred, a one-time mate of Osama bin Laden’s, and had been a trusted member of the royal
family’s inner circle. But Khashoggi fell out with the country’s 33-year-old ruler Mohammed bin Salman for daring to criticise social and economic reforms that MBS, as he’s known, began forcing on the strict Muslim nation. As he put it in an interview earlier this year, Khashoggi spoke up out of a sense of patriotism to his country ‘‘because if there is no-one to discuss it, he will not see the faults of that transformation’’.
Sensing the danger he was in from the increasingly authoritarian MBS, Khashoggi fled the kingdom in June last year and settled in the United States, where he became a highly respected columnist for The Washington Post.
On October 2, he arrived at the Turkish consulate to obtain documents for his marriage to his Turkish fiance´ e, Hatice Cengiz. Turkish officials say a Saudi hit squad lay in wait. Although they’re unwilling to release the tape or reveal how they got it, it seems certain the Turkish possess audio of his torture, murder and dismemberment, transforming his disappearance from a mystery into a horror show.
The death has led to a major diplomatic crisis, even as the US has tried to play peacemaker and help its closest Middle East ally dig itself out of a giant hole.
At every turn, the Saudis appear to have tried to hinder any serious investigation into Khashoggi’s death. When Turkish forensic officers were eventually allowed into the consulate, some two weeks after his disappearance, they found newly painted rooms, the building’s scent still thick with a fresh coat.
The consul-general Mohammed alOtaibi, who reports say could be heard on the murder tape telling the killers, ‘‘You’re going to get me in trouble’’, has abruptly left Turkey and has been relieved of his position. MBS has tried to claim that the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate falls under the regime’s jurisdiction, but the Turks have steadfastly pushed back on that claim.
Earlier this week the search for Khashoggi’s remains shifted from the consulate to al-Otaibi’s former home, 200 metres away. On Thursday, acting on fresh evidence, investigators began searching Istanbul’s Belgrad Forest as well as a farmhouse in the nearby Yalova province, where one of the Saudi ‘‘hit squad’’ reportedly owned property.
Yesterday, uniformed police officers showed up again to the consulate, entering via a back entrance, away from the cameras.
For now, the world awaits the results of a Saudi investigation – into themselves. Reports in The New York Times suggesting the Saudis are lining up a senior intelligence officer to take the blame, and that one of the hit squad has died in a car accident, don’t inspire confidence.
All eyes will be on whether the US will be prepared to punish its closest ally in the Middle East, if and when it is proven that the Saudis were responsible for the most gruesome of assassinations on one of their own for simply trying to tell the truth.
‘‘The Saudis appear to have tried to hinder any serious investigation.’’