He walked into the consulate ...then they cut off his fingers
A new book reveals chilling details about how a Saudi hit squad butchered the regime’s brave critic, Jamal Khashoggi
THE ripples from the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi just over a year ago never cease — and nor should they, given what an appalling affront to humanity and to press freedom his brutal killing was. The story refuses to be buried, just like the victim himself, whose dismembered and decapitated body has never been recovered.
Ripple One this week was news that the massive $2 trillion stock market flotation of a chunk of Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, will be handled by the relatively insignificant Riyadh stock market rather than in London or New York.
This is because of fears of a backlash in the West against the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, the powerful young Arab ruler widely believed to have ordered the silencing of the outspoken Khashoggi.
Meanwhile, from Washington came Ripple Two — gossip that President Trump’s sonin-law, Jared Kushner, gave MBS (as the Crown Prince is known) the green light to arrest Khashoggi.
The White House dismissed the allegation as ‘false nonsense’, which it may well be, but such is the scorpion’s nest surrounding Khashoggi’s assassination that almost anything seems possible.
The details of his death are well-known, having seeped out to an increasingly shocked world through transcripts of intercepts by security services who bugged the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where the killing — by a specially flown-in hit squad — took place.
Yet this new account, by Channel 4 News journalist Jonathan Rugman, still has the power to shock. He details how Khashoggi was lured to the Istanbul consulate, then describes — with chilling verbatim dialogue and sound effects — the struggle as he was jumped on, injected with a sedative and suffocated with a plastic bag.
AS THE life was choked out of him, looking down on him from the consulate walls were the gold-framed portraits of three Saudi rulers — the kingdom’s first king, Ibn Saud, the present ruler, Salman, and the heir, MBS.
It was their dictatorial power and their refusal to yield to any form of democracy that the freedom-loving Khashoggi had the temerity to challenge.
Caught in the crossfire between freedom of expression and absolute monarchical rule, he was paying the ultimate price for out of the consulate. Where they speaking out against them as a journalist ended up is unknown, his final in Saudi Arabia and more resting place a mystery that still recently — having gone into exile — haunts his loved ones. in the influential columns of the Within hours the 15-man hit squad Washington Post newspaper. was out of Istanbul and on its way
What happened next took his back home, leaving behind protestations death to a new level of depravity, of innocence from the like something out of a slasher film. consulate and a cover story,
Hidden microphones — security seemingly backed up by false CCTV services were bugging the consulate shots, that Khashoggi had left — caught the sound of a saw cutting unharmed and gone on his way. through human flesh. The killers thought they had covered
We must presume he was dead by their tracks, but they were then but, given the speed with wrong. It was not long before the which everything happened, there is Turkish authorities — on the say-so no certainty of that. of the country’s leader, President
The head and limbs of the 20-stone Erdogan, no friend of the Saudi Khashoggi were hacked off. So too regime — produced the evidence of were his fingers, presumably as a what had really happened and symbolic punishment, writes prompted international outrage. Rugman, for the articles he had But that outrage was tempered by typed with them. His remains were self-interest. Lucrative arms deals bundled into bags and smuggled were at stake. So too were strategic alliances and power plays in the volatile Middle East.
Trump was caught on the hop, condemning the killing one minute while trying to steer culpability away from the Crown Prince the next, despite the insistence of his own investigators at the CIA that MBS was in it up to his neck.
Added to that was (and is) the complication of son-in-law Kushner being a close friend of the Crown Prince and with his own agenda to pursue.
Which is where, one year on, matters still stand. Saudi Arabia, after finally owning up to some measure of responsibility, promises to punish the perpetrators but no heads have fallen in a land where retribution is usually savagely and publicly enforced. But, as we have seen, the scandal just won’t die. And nor should it. Rugman’s forensic investigation leaves us in no doubt that it was the Crown Prince who ordered Khashoggi’s death. Khashoggi’s close associates are understandably angry, but also puzzled by his actions. Why did he take the insane risk of going to the consulate in Istanbul when they’d warned him often enough that he was a marked man? The answer is that the 59year-old Khashoggi wanted to get married to a younger woman he’d just met and needed to get official papers confirming he was divorced from his previous wife and was free to take another. Yet even this, like everything in this tangled web of a story, is not as straightforward as it seems.
Khashoggi was no saint. His private life was complicated, to put it mildly, with more than one wife, sometimes at the same time, and children he rarely saw. Circumstances left him on his own, a desperately lonely man.
His third marriage was a love match, to Dr Alaa Nassif, who ran a charity that had the backing of the Saudi royal family. But his constant campaigning against them put her in a compromising position and she insisted that for the sake of his family (and for his own safety) he must stop writing articles that antagonised them.
Reluctantly he agreed — leaving him, as Rugman puts it, ‘muzzled twice, first by the Saudi state and then by the woman he loved’.
In the end he couldn’t stay silent, given all the human rights abuses he saw in Saudi. In 2017, seeing no future for himself in the Kingdom, he packed two suitcases and fled to the U.S. to take up his political writing again.
NASSIF stranded back in Saudi and banned from following him, divorced him, over the telephone. He was devastated and deeply hurt. And, as he saw it, alone in the world, even as he was making a name for himself with his columns in the Washington Post.
Homesick and sad, he wept a lot, an old friend recalled. ‘Many times I would see tears in his eyes.’ He was showing signs of depression.
On a trip to Istanbul in May 2018, he ran into a woman named Hatice Cengiz, an intense 36-year- old academic, and they began spending time together. Within a matter of months, Khashoggi was in love and hell-bent on marriage. He told her, ‘I have nobody to share life with’, and they got engaged.
Her father, though, was wary of Saudi men’s propensity for taking multiple wives. He demanded proof that Khashoggi was not a married man. (He was right to be suspicious. It later turned out that — unknown to everyone else — a month after he met Hatice, he had secretly married an Egyptian air stewardess in an Islamic wedding ceremony near his Washington home. He was still in touch with her by telephone shortly before his death.)
The only way Khashoggi could get the papers he needed to satisfy his prospective father-in-law was to go to the Saudi consulate.
On friday September 28, 2018, confident his Saudi enemies would not dare to attack him in a foreign country, he turned up there and, after an amicable exchange with officials, was told to come back next week.
Khashoggi spent the weekend in London at a conference on international affairs, giving a talk on BBC World News and seeing old friends.
Then, cock-a-hoop that his life was about to embark on an exciting new phase, he flew back to Istanbul and on Tuesday afternoon, just after 1pm, he presented himself at the entrance of the Saudi consulate.
Watched by Hatice, he passed through the glass swing doors, embossed with the crossed gold swords that are Saudi Arabia’s national symbol — and was never seen again.