‘Khashoggi Dragged, Murdered and Dismembered’

Trump Says Ties With Saudi Arabia ‘Excellent’:

LONDON -- Jamal Khashoggi was dragged from the consul general's office inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last Tuesday before he was brutally murdered by two men who cut up his body, sources close to the investigation have told Middle East Eye.
Turkish officials say they know when and where in the building the veteran Saudi journalist was killed and are considering whether to dig up the consul-general's garden to see whether his remains are buried there.

Khashoggi, 59, has been missing since last Tuesday when he entered the consulate to obtain paperwork so he could remarry, and has not been seen since.

Saudi officials have strongly denied any involvement in his disappearance and say that he left the consulate soon after arriving. However they have not presented any evidence to corroborate their claim and say that video cameras at the consulate were not recording at the time.

A Turkish source with direct knowledge of the investigation has given MEE a detailed account of what investigators say happened in the consulate last Tuesday.

"We know when Jamal was killed, in which room he was killed and where the body was taken to be dismembered. If the forensic team are allowed in, they know exactly where to go," he said.

Khashoggi first went to the consulate on September 28 and met with a Saudi diplomat in an attempt to get the papers he needed.

The Saudi diplomat passed him on to a member of Saudi intelligence who said the consulate would be unable to provide what he needed that day, but he could return the following week, the source said.

Khashoggi left the building on Friday with the telephone number of the intelligence official. 

On Tuesday morning, Khashoggi called and asked if he should still come to the consulate and was told that the papers were ready for him, the source said. His appointment was for 1pm.

Half an hour before then, during the lunch break held at the consulate, all local staff members left for their usual lunch break which lasts an hour. As they left, they were told to take the afternoon off because a high-level diplomatic meeting was planned for the afternoon in the consulate, the source said. 

As a time-stamped photo first published by the Washington Post has shown, Khashoggi walked into the consulate less than an hour later at 1.14 pm.

He was greeted by an official, and led into the consul-general's room. Shortly afterwards, two men entered the room and dragged Khashoggi out of the office and into another room where they killed him, the source said, without elaborating how he was killed.
Khashoggi's body was then dragged into a third room and dismembered, he said. 

A Saudi source told Reuters that British intelligence believed there had been an attempt to drug Khashoggi inside the consulate that culminated in an overdose. 

He said the information came from a British intelligence source.  

There are around 22 cars which are registered to the consulate of which between three and four are of interest to the murder inquiry.

One of them left the consulate building at 3:15pm and went several hundred meters to the nearby consul general's home, the source said.

MEE understands that the prosecutor general is now considering whether to dig up the consul general's garden to see whether Khashoggi's remains are buried there.
A separate Turkish source told MEE that the consul general has not left his house for the past three days and has cancelled all of his appointments.

This source also said that the Turkish police want to search the residence and also take all the cars which are registered to the consulate to a secure location to examine them, but the Saudis have not allowed this.

A source also told MEE the Saudis took all the hard drives from the security camera room at the consulate with them when they left the building.

The Saudis on Tuesday rescinded an offer they made originally to allow Turkish forensic experts onto the premises. Their offer was withdrawn after Turkish media outlets published a list of 15 Saudis who arrived in Istanbul on the same day Khashoggi disappeared.

The source who outlined the account of how Khashoggi was killed said that police investigators were confident they already had enough forensic evidence from searches of the sewage network connected to the building.

A second Turkish source with knowledge of the investigation told MEE that the Turks had video and audio evidence of the killing. However, they have not revealed how they obtained this evidence. 

But particular attention is being paid to the Apple watch that Khashoggi was wearing when he entered the building. This is synced electronically to the iPhone that he gave his fiancee before entering the building.

Later on Friday, Saudi Arabia confirmed that it had formed a joint team with Turkey to "uncover the circumstances of the disappearance" of the veteran journalist, the state-run Saudi Press Agency said Thursday.

Global business leaders are reassessing their ties with Saudi Arabia, stoking pressure on the Persian Gulf kingdom to explain what happened to the dissident writer.

British billionaire Richard Branson Friday suspended business links with Saudi Arabia, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he might not attend a major investment conference in the country this month.

The investment conference lists dozens of expected speakers, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, Blackrock Chairman Larry Fink and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the latter confirming Friday that he will go.

"I am planning on going at this point," he told broadcaster CNBC. "If more information comes out and changes, we could look at that."

Joe Kaeser, the president and CEO of German industrial giant Siemens AG, also still plans to attend for now.

The Financial Times, which is listed as a media partner to the event, announced it would no longer be doing so.

CNN canceled its partnership, and said its anchors and reporters would no longer moderate panels. The New York Times and its business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin similarly pulled out of the event. CNBC also said Friday it would not participate.

However, major U.S. defense contractors expressed concern to the Trump administration that lawmakers angered by the disappearance of the Saudi journalist will block further arms deals with Saudi Arabia, a senior U.S. official told Reuters Friday.

U.S. President Donald Trump said he is not willing to throw away billions of dollars in military deals with Saudi Arabia over the suspected murder.

"What good does that do us?” Trump asked, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday.

"This took place in Turkey and to the best of our knowledge, Khashoggi is not a United States citizen,” Trump added, brushing aside the fact that the journalist lived in the U.S. 

In a separate interview, Trump told Fox News that while he didn’t "like” the incident and had assigned investigators to get to the bottom of the issue, relations with Saudi Arabia remained "excellent”.

Khashoggi’s Possible Murder Opens Gates of Hell for Saudi Regime

By: Kayhan Int’l 

When the Saudi regime unmanly martyred prominent religious leader, Sheikh Baqer Nimr an-Nimr in January 2016 and brutally suppressed the popular protests that erupted as a result in the Eastern Region, it reserved for itself a blazing place in the eternal inferno, having entered the fires of hell almost a year earlier in March 2015 with its unprovoked war on Yemen to kill so far over 20,000 Muslim men, women, and children, in addition to the crime of injuring scores of thousands of others, destroying the infrastructure, displacing hundreds of thousands from their homes and hearths, and trapping millions in diseases and famine.

Sadly, these crimes against humanity of the heretical Wahhabi minority cult which governs the family fiefdom created by Britain in 1932, went unpunished in this transient world because of the US-Israeli support for the Saudis and the treason to Islam of most Muslim leaders who thrive on the multi-million dollar grants doled out to them by Riyadh from the looted oil-wealth of the deprived native Shi’a Muslim majority of the once independent Eastern Region. 

Emboldened by the ominous silence of the Ummah and the world at large towards its unabated sacrilegious acts of terrorism that neither respect the sovereignty of Muslim countries nor the sanctity of the holy sites in the Wahhabi-occupied Land of Revelation, Hijaz, related to Prophet Muhammad (SAWA), his blessed household, and his companions; the Saudis this time cowardly killed one of their own dissenting journalists and that too on the soil of a foreign country.

The latest murder would have also gone unnoticed and unlamented had Jamal Khashoggi (correct pronunciation "Khashoqchi” or Spoon-Maker in Turkish) been a member of the suppressed Shi’a Muslims of Arabia, or an ordinary Sunni citizen adhering to the officially banned schools of Hanafi, Shafe’i, Maleki and Hanbali jurisprudence. 

Since the victim was a ‘political’ Wahhabi of a prominent family of Turkish descent (his grandfather Mohammad Khaled Khashoqchi was personal physician to Abdul-Aziz the desert brigand of Jewish origin from Najd for whom London had created the artificial entity Saudi Arabia), having close cooperation with the regime in intelligence and security matters before falling out last year with the current clique and settling in the US where he acquired American nationality and wrote for the leading daily ‘Washington Post’, the gates of hell in this mortal world are being opened upon senile King Salman ibn Abdul-Aziz, or more properly on his self-imposed Heir Apparent Mohamed bin Salman (MBS) – the power behind the throne.

From Washington to the capitals of Western Europe, the press and the political leaders, including the American president and his Secretary of State, are openly calling for clarification from Riyadh whether Khashoggi has actually been killed as reported or being detained for his regular criticism of the destructive policies of MBS including the war in Yemen and the suppression of freedom at home.

In Ankara, President Rajab Tayyeb Erdoghan of Turkey, has assumed personal charge for probing the case of Jamal Khashoggi who on October 2 stepped into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in full view of CCTV, only to disappear in thin air. The claims of the consulate that the journalist left shortly were disproved by the CCTV which have recorded the sudden appearance of some 15 tough looking Saudi guys into the consulate later that day and their departure with large boxes on the same day for the international airport for flight back to Riyadh.

Speculations are rife that Khashoggi, whose fiancé waited for long hours in frustration outside the consulate before notifying the police of his failure to come out, was murdered and his dismembered body removed in boxes.   

Since October 3, the Turkish foreign ministry has several times summoned the Saudi ambassador several times to demand explanation, but has not received any convincing answers. The Turkish judiciary has authorized the search of the Saudi consulate, along with forensic experts to determine what actually happened.

The report will certainly be embarrassing for the Saudi regime, whose de facto head, MBS, continues to issue ever-changing statements, oblivious of the fact that he is axing his own feet.

Khashoggi seems to have become the latest victim of Riyadh’s witch-hunt against ‘dissident’ voices. This is what happens when insiders, especially those involved in intelligence and security matters, disavow the regime. 

The question that arises is: Should Khashoggi’s disappearance matter in the face of the broad violence, abuse and altogether oppression Saudi Arabia continues to commit?

The answer is obvious. It indicates the unraveling of a system now focused on eating its own out of fear of being ousted. The situation is dangerous and all indicators point to serious erosion of regime legitimacy that will certainly lead to an implosion from within.

The Turks have long seen the Saudis as upstarts unworthy of political legitimacy. Moreover, Riyadh has already annoyed Ankara through its irrational policies of blockading Qatar, and using General Abdul-Fattah as-Sisi to discredit the Muslim Brotherhood and overthrow the elected government of President Mohammad Morsi. 

It means MBS now stands alone as the regime appears to be on a course of free fall, with even friends in the White House seeing him as a dangerous liability and no longer a strategic partner. In other words, Washington may have no other choice but to dump MBS.

Saudi media tries to cover up circumstances of Khashoggi’s death

By Ramin Hossein Abadian

TEHRAN - A week has passed since Jamal Khashoggi, the high-profile critic of the Saudi leadership, was last seen entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The Saudis continue to deny any knowledge of his whereabouts.

The speculation over the House of Saud’s role in the murder of Khashoggi runs high with numerous speculations and reports. Since the Saudi authorities are not capable of addressing the ambiguities surrounding the death of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudis’ state-own media have worked round the clock to distract the public’s attention.

Al Arabiya News Channel in an exclusive interview with Salah Khashoggi, Jamal Khashoggi’s eldest son, made attempts to show Khashoggi’s disappearance differently to the public.

Khashoggi’s son claimed: “There are attempts by foreign parties to politicize the disappearance of my father. This is totally unacceptable. The issue at hand is that there is a Saudi citizen who has gone missing. We are cooperating with the Saudi authorities to uncover the circumstances. The issue is a personal matter and is far from a political matter. My last contact with my father was during his stay in Washington. I had no idea about his recent trip to Turkey and his presence there.”

The interview questions were posed in a way to fulfill the House of Saud’s objective. Al Arabiya tried to impose its position on Khashoggi’s son’s words in order to make the allegations more credible. While the direct role of Saudi Arabia in the killing of Khashoggi is quite evident, childish remarks blaming Khashogg’s personality issues cannot go anywhere.

Meanwhile, other Saudi media, including the Al-Hadith network, have made efforts to cover Riyadh's crackdown on Khashoggi. 

The Saudi network, without referring to Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi prince, and his desire to hold the throne and to take out opponents, tries to cover up any link between bin Salman and Khashoggi's murder. But media has failed to cover up the murder of Khashoggi in the embassy.

Even the Washington Post, a major American newspaper, says that two Turkish police officers have confirmed the murder of Khashoggi that it was preplanned, and a 15-member hit squad, allegedly Saudi policemen, came from Saudi Arabia to Turkey.

In an interview with Bloomberg News last week, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman claimed that Khashoggi had left the Saudi Consulate in Turkey shortly after his entry on Tuesday.

“Mojtahed” an active member on Twitter, twitted: “Turkish sources say Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was tortured then murdered, and his body was mutilated after the murder. Pictures of all these events are available. A video of the torture and murder of Khashoggi has been sent to Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. If the news is confirmed, it means that bin Salman had never left Turkey to Saudi Arabia.” Mojtahed’s tweet has led to a new wave of protest against the Saudi family.

The United Nations has also gotten involved with the case for Khashoggi's death. The UN special rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression, David Kaye, has called for an investigation into the disappearance and alleged murder of the prominent Saudi journalist in Turkey.

“Disappearance and alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi requires an immediate and independent international investigation,” Kaye tweeted on Sunday.