Saudis seek death penalty for 5 in Khashoggi killing
BEIRUT — Saudi Arabia’s public prosecutor Thursday formally requested the death penalty for five suspects in the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi but provided no new information about the murder or the investigation into how it happened.
The killing of Khashoggi inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul has badly tarnished the international reputation of the kingdom and of its crown prince and dayto-day ruler, Mohammed bin Salman.
After weeks of insisting that Khashoggi had left the consulate alive Oct. 2, the kingdom acknowledged in November that its agents had killed and dismembered him, and it vowed to hold the perpetrators accountable.
After the first court session in the case Thursday, the public prosecutor’s office released a statement saying it had requested the death penalty for five of the 11 suspects charged.
It did not provide any of the suspects’ names or any details about what role they might have played in the crime. Nor did the statement explain why the prosecutor had sought the death penalty against some but not others.
Turkish officials and investigations by the New York Times have found that Khashoggi’s killing was the result of a complex operation that involved at least 15 agents who flew to Turkey specifically for the job, many of them closely connected to Mohammed. They included intelligence agents who had traveled with the crown prince, a physician who specialized in autopsies and brought a bone saw, and a body double who donned Khashoggi’s clothes and walked around Istanbul seeking to leave a false trail of evidence that he was still alive.
Saudi Arabia has insisted that despite the complexity of the operation, the decision to kill Khashoggi, 59, was made by the team on the ground and had not been ordered by their superiors in Riyadh.
Khashoggi had been close to the Saudi royal family before Mohammed’s rise to power. He moved to the United States and became a public critic of the Saudi government, writing columns for the Washington Post.
Demonstrating that it will hold accountable those responsible for Khashoggi’s killing is expected to be a crucial part of the kingdom’s efforts to move past the scandal, which has complicated its foreign relations and scared off Western investors it was counting on to support its cultural and economic reform plans.
But it remains unclear whether the trial, and the lack of public information about the legal proceedings, will quell worries in the West about Saudi Arabia’s respect for the rule of law. The kingdom’s courts enforce a strict interpretation of Shariah law, the legal code of Islam based on the Quran, but are also easily influenced by the country’s royal leaders, critics say.
While the Trump administration, which considers the kingdom under Mohammed’s leadership an important ally in the Middle East, has stood by the prince, U.S. intelligences services and members of Congress believe that he ordered the killing.