Grisly details, tears in Khash kill
STRANGLED WHEN HE WALKED IN: SOURCES
He never had a chance.
Jamal Khashoggi was strangled as soon as he set foot inside Saudi Arabia's consulate in Instabul and his body was dismembered and disposed of as part of a premeditated murder, Turkish officials said Wednesday.
The statement from chief Istanbul prosecutor Irfan Fidan's office marks the first public confirmation of how the Saudi journalist died. It comes on the heels of Fidan's sit-down with Saudi chief prosecutor Saud al-Mojeb, which he said yielded no “concrete results” despite “good-willed efforts” by Turkey to uncover the truth.
During her first interview with American media, his grieving fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, recalled how Khashoggi worried that he may be detained inside the consulate.
The Washington Post journalist during his initial trip to the consulate on Sept. 28 was very much concerned that he would end up in jail like so many other Saudi journalists when he turned up to request the documents required to marry Cengiz, a Turkish national.
“He thought of the possibility of them capturing him,” she told ABC News. “He didn't want to face the consequences of his political views.”
But when Khashoggi was greeted with a warm welcome when they did arrive, his concerns all but melted away. He'd long been “homesick” and felt a familiar “emotional connection” with his countrymen when they arrived at the consulate.
The couple returned to retrieve their documents four days later on Oct. 2 — they were “full of hope” and one step away from spending the rest of their lives together.
“Naturally after our first positive visit we had no reasons to think that were would be any sort of danger,” Cengiz said.
Cengiz waited for hours outside of the consulate the day Khashoggi went missing. When the building closed, she began to grow nervous but she did not begin to fear the worst though until reports of a planeload of Saudis arriving in Turkey the day her fiancé disappeared began to circulate.
“I didn't want to believe,” she told ABC News. “That was the first day I said to myself perhaps there could be a tragedy. I wanted to believe that he was alive until the end.”
Saudi Arabia initially denied any knowledge of Khashoggi's disappearance and maintained that he left the consulate alive. But after weeks of speculation and leaks from Turkish officials suggesting the writer had been murdered, Saudi officials admitted Khashoggi had died during “an altercation” inside the consulate.
Riyahd would later change its story again and say his murder was premeditated.
“When Saudi officials accepted the responsibility, then I believed it happened,” Cengiz said.
The grieving fiancée on Monday called on President Trump and other world leaders to ensure that justice is served in the journalist's death and that it not be covered up.
“He should not pave the way for a cover-up of my fiance's murder,” she said. “Let's not let money taint our conscience and compromise our values.”
Cengiz told ABC she has one final task to complete before she can continue on in her healing process.
“We still don't know where Jamal's body is. There is no explanation about this. He did not have a funeral yet. This is not acceptable Islamic rules,” she said.
“This is our last duty to fulfill.”