Embassy mystery

Last Tuesday, a 59-year-old Saudi national entered his country’s consulate building in Istanbul to obtain papers that he needed for his forthcoming marriage. He has not been seen since. Little attention might have been paid to this incident except the Saudi, Jamal Khashoggi, was a journalist and critic of the Riyadh regime and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Turkish authorities have now accused the Saudis of killing him and spiriting his body out of the country.

It is somewhat ironic for the Turks to be so solicitous about the fate of a journalist, given the treatment meted out to critics of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, many of whom have been put on trial, imprisoned or exiled. Turkey also has a longstanding feud with the Saudis that has been exacerbated in recent years by Ankara’s support for Qatar, which is locked in a bitter stand-off with their bigger Arab neighbour over their ties to Iran.

But leaving aside complex geopolitics of the region, a simple question remains: what has happened to Mr Khashoggi? A country’s embassy or consulate may be technically their territory, but that does not give them the right to carry out extrajudicial assassinations of their own nationals living abroad. If the Turkish allegation is proven true then this is little different from the Russians trying to murder ex-spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, apart from the methods used.

The Saudis are adamant that Mr Khashoggi left the consulate unharmed and have invited Turkish officials to search the building. There is no concrete evidence that he has been killed and Turkey needs to back up its serious charge. But the Saudis, too, must convince a sceptical world that they really do have nothing to hide and are not hunting down critics who have built new lives overseas.